Any luck in repairing failing Powerbook wireless?

Question

The wireless in my two-year old powerbook G4 (bought just before the
Intels came out) is starting to get flakey. It'll work fine for
awhile (no clear pattern in how long) and then iStumbler shows a big drop-off in signal (when a nearby mini is showing no change) and eventually it won't
carry any traffic. Rebooting may or may not get it working again,
although generally a period of rest (sleep) will. (Possibly warming up causes it to fail -- definitely not overheating, though.) I've read of
others that seem to have similar problems, although it's not clear if
they are all of the same cause. What luck have people had in getting
them fixed? I'm mostly concerned that if it is "the antenna wire
through the cover problem" that can't be fixed, but if it's the
internal card or how its seated that can be. I understand that one option would be an external CPMCIA card, but I'd still have to have the case opened to disconnect the internal one.
Ted Lee
Minnetonka, MN

Answer 1

For those who've been following this, this saga took an interesting twist. In the process of researching whether others were having the same kind of problems with the Quickertek 802.11 b/g PCMCIA wireless card I was having I discovered that Ralink, the manufacturer of the RT61 chipset used, was really the supplier of the software too and they have an updated version of both the driver and user interface software on their website. (I've politely told Quickertek they should be aware of it.) I uninstalled what I'd gotten from Quickertek and installed the updated software and the card works flawlessly. It wakes from sleep and maintains a solid connection (with the Quickertek supplied software it seemed to keep losing the connection under slighly weak signal conditions.) With my Linksys WRT54GS up on the second floor I was able to get a solid connection (less than 1% CRC failure rate) in a location down in the basement where the built-in -- possibly failing -- Airport card didn't even see the signal. I could see the server and client were nicely negotiating a lower transmission rate to keep the error rate low (36 or 48 Mbs, if I remember right -- still faster than my DSL line anyway.) The selling point of the card for me was that since it came with its own software I didn't need to physically disconnect the internal card. So after all that I'm now a happy camper.
Ted Lee
Minnetonka, MN