Airport Card download 525 meg in 3 hours?

At a guess, your internet connection is 512Kb/sec (512 Kilobits per second.) However an 802.11 card, even in B mode, is capable of 11Mb/sec (11 Megabits per second.)

Put these two in the same terms:

Internet Connection, Max: 512Kb/sec
802.11b Connection, Max: 11,264Kb/sec

- or -

Internet Connection, Max: .512Mb/sec
802.11b Connection, Max: 11Mb/sec

-- Still with me? All of that to say, a b-capable AirPort card is 22 times faster than your Internet connection is, using the theoretical maximums of both (and yes, I know that's not happening.) If you have a g-capable card, theres even more of a speed difference.

So THAT means, yeah, your AirPort card can pull down the same speed as being wired directly in, _from the Internet._ Try to send a file, on your internal network, from one machine to the other though, and that's where you will probably see the slowness; 11Mbit 802.11b is gonna get blown away by 100Mbps Ethernet.

Wow. Um did I explain it? Or just babble

-- Macinjosh

EDIT: Theoretical maximum speed of your Internet connection, in 3 hours:

512Kb/sec = 64KB/sec * 60 sec = 3,840K/min (3.75 MB, or "megs" a minute)

3840K/min * 60 min = 230,400K an hour, * 3 =

691,200KB or 675MB in 3 hours

Yes you explained very well. I just never thought about the numbers. I just heard that the old standard airport b card was horribly slow...and just figured.....yeah well they are nearly 10 years old....and expected it to be like.....dial up X 2 or X3 speed. I was actually expecting to just leave that download going from morning till next day or something.

So this is good. It means that even if I upgraded my broadband to the fasted available speed, the old airport would still be fine.

Suppose it only considered slow when you use it on a lan, even then it would be ok for typical stuff. Doubt you would even notice the diff unless you were running virtual desktop or moving really big files.

So this old clam not as obsolete as I thought. I put Ubuntu 6.06 on it a while ago. It rocked....even with KDE desktop and desktop effects.....I'm installing tiger in couple of weeks when I obtain the disk. Was going to use Ubuntu 8.04 as well......but now I'm looking at Darwin because it has the best flash support of all the linux distos for ppc.....so I believe anyway.

Thanks for the insight

Stu

The biggest issues with these old iBooks (I've got a 600MHz myself) is the CPU speed. Streaming video from YouTube or whatever isn't great, but it does work. The AirPort speed is plenty fast enough, but the CPU struggles to keep up. It's nearly the same issue on the PC world. I've tested a Celeron 700 and a P3 733 on the same mobo, and with only a 33MHz jump and a doubling of cache (128KB vs 256KB) and a doubling of bus speed (66MHz vs 133MHz) streaming video became smooth instead of jerky and slow. If your iBook isn't doing CPU intesive stuff on the internet it'll be great. A bunch of Flash or streaming video will make it choke.

Yes I kinda noticed the streaming video is bit slower then on my 1.7ghz 2 gig acer...just a bit lol. But really its not bad as long as your only looking at the one page at a time and not trying to run a heap of programs at the same time. If your just browsing youtube and you look at a video, and you just watch that without doing anything else its acceptable.

Anyway, new problem. I got a toshiba SD-R2512 combo drive. I read a guide on installing this in the clamshell. It writes cds and read dvd. It's not made for the clamshell, I got a guide on moding the clamshell bezel to fit, etc, etc. I got all the physical stuff worked out, fitted. Thing is it wouldn't boot from the drive, or read or write for that matter. The drive is new so I am assuming it's ok. If I hold option down on boot, it will bring up the icon of what ever boot disc I have in it. If I run ubuntu of the hard disc it will show what disc is in the drive, name of disk, but when I try and open a disc I get error.

I have a suspicion that the clamshell doesn't know how to work with this drive. Is there something in firmware I would have to edit, or add to enable it to work with the drive. No clamshell came with a burner of any kind. The 466mhz models came with cd/dvd readers, but people have successfully installed this exact drive in clamshells and got them working.

Hope I can get this going because I tested the dvd playback capabilities by burning a section of dvd onto a cd and it plays it really good. So this little mac would make an ok mobile dvd player as well as other things.

Regards

Stu

Is the drive set for slave or master?