Wireless won't work in 10.4.6 - 10.4.10...MacBook about to be Windows only

Question

Hi. A while ago, month or so, I started having the wireless problems runnning rampant in the 10.4.10 release. It started with dropped connections to my linksys router, then spotty connections to University WPA. This drove me nuts and I tried every possible way to fix it. The fix on this board (using pacifist and reninstalling the appleairport.kext files) worked for a while, then it quit working again. I reinstalled back to 10.4.9 and that again worked for a while, and again it quit working. I finally decided I was fed up and reinstalled OSX, completely wiping my hard drive at the same time. This sent me back to 10.4.6. I stepwise updated from 10.4.6 to 10.4.9 installing whatever Airport updates it allowed, up to Extreme 2007-3. After any and every iteration, I get the same results:
Connection to Linksys router running DDWRT and WPA Personal, WPA2, WEP, No Security.
It connects for about 15-30 seconds. Internet works great. Internet stops working. Internet may or may not start working again in the next 15 minutes. If it does, it will last about 30 seconds to a minute. Eventually the Airport symbol goes gray. Attempted reconnects result in "Failed to connect to ___" from airport. This has happened constantly since 10.4.10, even after a complete reformatting of my harddrive. I am very upset.
Connection to University WPA Enterprise-----
I open 802.1X to connect. While watching the proceedings in "Internet Connect", status goes from Idle, to connecting, to authenticating....after 2 mins, 15, 30 it might say connected. It doesn't matter, the internet doesn't work. On rare occasion, it will ask me to "Verify the Certificate", when I select yes, it will say "Connected to ______ via TTLS" then the internet will work. It will work fine until I disconnect or close my mac. Upon reopening I have roughly a 1 in 30 chance of it working. I am very upset.
I don't understand why I would have these issues. My MacBook worked great wirelessly all through 2006 and through august of 2007. Reinstalling from my original disks should have made the software exactly the same as it was in 2006 when it worked. There is nothing on this machine that was not on it originally. Does this mean it's a hardware issue? If so, shouldn't my MacBook not work when I use windows? In any case, this is really upsetting me. Also, I have not contacted Apple, my last trip to the 'Genius Bar" resulted in broken speakers in exchange for repairing my headphone jack. Could one of the fine people on this board please help me out...any suggestions before this becomes a Windows machine?
Edit: I am currently leaving my Mac with 10.4.9 installed and Airport Extreme Update 2007-3.
Message was edited by: James Farner

Answer 1

Well, if there is anyone out there having the same problems I've been having, you might want to take a look at my blog. I wrote up my findings on two commercial packages there:
http://weblog.bosslogic.com/2006/05/betterfaxsupp.html
The bottom line on fax and efax: I was never able to get these command-line utilities to work. I suspect it's a misconfiguration in OS/X 10.4.6 or perhaps just some poor documentation... but, for the price, the commercial products solved what I needed quickly, easily and cheaply.
One thing I didn't mention in my blog: For higher-end, demanding fax services you might want to look at 4-Sight Fax. This is a server-based solution that starts at about $500 and can scale upwards. Far more than what I needed so I didn't look into it too closely.