Are the wireless cards in Macs noted for their ability to pick up signals around corners or at greater distances than the average?
I ask because this new MacBook Pro we have has not had a single occasion where it lost/dropped the wireless signal from the back room. The Asus netbook, on the other hand, regularly lost the signal after about twenty minutes. We had to stop, attempt to reconnect, curse, reconnect, and then try to continue what we were doing.
Knock on wood, of course.
Posted by Linkmeister at August 17, 2010 03:17 PM | TrackBackMy experience is they are pretty good, but I don't have a lot of non-Mac hardware to compare them against. They do seem to be better than our iPhones.
Posted by: Rob McMillin at August 17, 2010 04:29 PMAre you using an Apple base station? When I bought my current MacBook Pro three years ago I wanted to upgrade my net to 802.11n, so I first bought a cheaper base, a Belkin. It worked OK with my wife's iMac (which is 802.11g), but kept dropping the connection to the laptop. After a few days of this I returned the Belkin and bought an Airport Extreme, which has worked fine with the iMac, the MacBook, an iPod Touch, and an iPhone. So I conjecture that the standards are not as standard as they should be, or the different vendors' implementations aren't quite as standard as they claim, and that interoperability is more a wish than a fact.
Posted by: Bruce Cohen (Speaker to Managers) at August 17, 2010 07:59 PMIt's a Dynex 802.11g wireless router. It sits on a desk about four feet from the CPU and DSL modem. The MacBook Pro and the netbook are used maybe 75 feet away in the family room. Down the hall, a 45-degree angle through the kitchen door and into the room where Mom works with it.
Posted by: Linkmeister at August 17, 2010 08:57 PMIt doesn't sound like the problem is signal propagation or something bizarre in the bas station. If the problem doesn't happen when the Ausus is near the base, then I'd suspect bad design on the Asus; if it happens independent of distance then it's almost certainly an interoperability problem.
Frankly, I'm leery of netbooks. Cramming all the guts of a portable computer into that small a case just about has to result in unfortunate design tradeoffs.
Posted by: Bruce Cohen (Speaker to Managers) at August 18, 2010 09:55 AM