Odds and Ends: G5 Airport reception; No more Panther compatibility updates from Palm?

G5 Airport reception Lew Buckley reports poor AirPort reception on his Power Mac G5, while other systems in the same physical vicinity consistently deliver full signal strength:

"My G5 never shows more than a 'two-band' signal strength (of the four bands that show on the menubar at the top of the screen.)

"Details: I have recently installed Airport into my home "LAN", which consists of three Macs - my wife's G4 PowerBook, my old 400mhz G4 tower, and my brand new 1.6 GHz G5. [...]

"Both of the G4's consistently show a band strength of 4, but the G5, which is sitting right beside the tower G4 (I haven't yet finished the changeover process) never shows more than two bands, and often, including right now, shows just one. The two tower computers are only about 6 feet from the Airport base station, the laptop is usually across the room - maybe 20' away.

"In addition, I often have to 'putz around' with the G5 to get online; it usually (perhaps always - I'm not sure yet) doesn't connect to the network on restart, and even when it is connected to the network, it isn't always connected to the Internet. If I mess with the Network System Preferences long enough, it fixes itself and I can go online. And I do mean "mess with" - there's nothing specific I can point to, I just turn things on and off, check signal strength, etc., and eventually it works again. I don't know if this second problem is related to the first or not.

If you are having Power Mac G5 AirPort problems, note Knowledge Base article #86411 which explains "Make sure you have the appropriate external Bluetooth and/or AirPort antennas properly connected at the rear of the computer. The AirPort antenna is included with the Power Mac G5 and is compatible with the AirPort Extreme card."

No more Mac updates from Palm? We have previously reported several problems synching Tungsten T3 handhelds with Macs running Mac OS X 10.3.x.

Recently, MacFixit reader Dave Steinber wrote to Palm asking when new drivers would be released, and received the following pride:

"Thank you very much for your inquiry. I understand that you need the Palm Desktop software compatible with the Mac OS 10.3. Dave, Palm Inc. has designed the PalmDesktop 4.1 for compatibility with Mac OS X. However, there has been a limited testing of this version of Palm Desktop conducted with Mac OS 10.2.7 and above currently. Palm Inc, is working on this. Please visit our Palm Website for further Update."

Dave then says he called Palm technical support and "was told on the phone that Palm would not udpate the Mac desktop software anymore."

We have as of yet been unable to confirm this information with Palm, though it seems unlikely that the company (albeit very late to deliver) would completely cease efforts to improve Tungsten/Mac OS X 10.3.x compatibility.

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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