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Mac OS X  |  Drivers  |  Network  |  Wireless Driver  |  No WPA for you! But lots of happy fun kernel panics.

Wireless Driver

Wireless Driver

for many 802.11a/b/g cards

Version:  3.3

   [ Views: 528 ]

No WPA for you! But lots of happy fun kernel panics.

Feedback Type:  Review

Contributed by: mikep9 Saturday, March 31 2007 @ 02:11 PM PDT

Product Platform: MacOSX

Used Product For: 1-6 months

Recommend Product: NO

OrangeWare seems to have only done the bare minimum to get this driver to work.

It will associate/communicate with Open and WEP-protected 802.11b/g networks, but that's about it.

How much does it suck?
Let me count the ways...

1.) The control panel layout and operation is absolutely byzantine.

2.) While it teases you with WPA support, it doesn't really work. (Only later did I find the fine print on OrangeWare's web site about that.)

3.) Selecting "Power off Card" in the OS, removing the wireless card, then reinserting that or any other PC card will cause a kernel panic every time.

4.) If your wireless card has a retractable antenna, unsleeping the laptop before deploying the antenna will cause a kernel panic about 75% of the time.

5.) OrangeWare has no plans to finish implementing WPA support in their driver. Their reply also failed to address the kernel panic issues I brought to their attention.

If you need a modern wireless card for an older Mac, buy a card with a broadcom 802.11g chipset. Most of the cards listed here
http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/?go=devices
should be recognized right away by MacOS as an "AirPort Extreme" card.   
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