I bought Magda a Macbook Pro as a Valentines present thinking that all Macbook Pros were equal. Sadly they’re not.

I bought mine 4 years ago. it’s a Macbook Pro Core Duo 2.16, 2gb and I upgraded the HDD from 120gb to 500gb about a year ago…. So when one appeared on Ebay at a reasonable price, it looked like exactly the same spec and I bought it.

Anyway – I did a clean installation of Snow Leopard and connected to my Belkin N1 Vision wireless router which is an absolutely awesome router if you have 50mb Virgin Broadband. Whereas my old Macbook was blisteringly fast…. this new Ebay one seemed to perform like a dead dog savaging a sheep. The connection speed went up and down erratically and at times it wouldn’t connect at all just giving me a ‘Connection Timeout Message’

Belkin N Vision Rocks!!!

I tried a number of Internet speed tests and finally settled on the Giganews one because it was quick and easy to do – and I could run the test several times a second without answering lots of stupid questions.

Whereas my connection gave a healthy average speed of around 34000. Hers kept bouncing between zero and 10000Kbps and frequently freezing up altogether. In short it wasn’t a fun way to surf the Internet.

Anyway – to avoid further digression, I eventually checked the “About This Mac” page and found that her Macbook had a Atheros 5424: 2.1.14.5 whereas mine had an Atheros 5416: 2.1.14.15 – The difference being that hers only supported 802.11 a/b/g whereas the 5416 supported a/b/g/n.

So for a quick solution, I bought a Sumvision SVW322U for the Mac from Amazon and plugged it in….

Whose bright idea was it to use a Mini CD for Mac Drivers?

…And it didn’t work. The CD that came with it was one of those ridiculous mini-CD’s which doesn’t even work in Macbook or an iMac anyway. So I decided to Google for the drivers.. and nothing came up (apart from loads of affiliates trying to flog me one ) – In the end, I gave up and rummaged to find an old Toshiba Portege R700
that would take one a mini CD and copied the drivers to a USB stick.

Anyway – I copied the drivers to the Macbook and it worked, but the drivers were quite old and the method of connection somewhat primitive compared to the slick Aiport Icon at the top. However – I could not identify the driver, and it appears that the Sumvision SVW322U is just a rebranded version of Ralink RT2780 and you can download mac drivers for Sumvision SVW322U here.

The new drivers work a treat and now Magda’s laptop is performing very nicely. In fact, I’m even writing this blog post on her machine. It’s amazing that the only difference between her machine and mine was the WiFi and what a difference that makes.

Broadcom BCM4321

The only downside to using  USB Wireless N Sumvision SVW322U is that it sticks out of the side of the machine. As such, I have taken a gamble and ordered a Broadcom BCM4321 Mini-PCI Express internal card from Taiwan (was around £14 with the delivery charges) – I’m hoping that I can replace the crappy Atheros card with the Broadcom and not have to have a USB thingy sticking out.

It hasn’t arrived yet.