TechgnosisWeb Prime

So, you may have heard that I recently got an iMac. And as I mentioned back then, I set it up in the bedroom, and due to a general desire to not have ugly Cat5 Ethernet cables strung from the bedroom to the computer room (and in the interest of retaining the peace in my relationship), I bought a Belkin F5D7050_V2 USB Wireless G Adapter (I already have a little D-link Wireless Router/Firewall/VPN appliance). Setting up this little monster was not an easy task: While Belkin does make drivers and a ‘Wireless manager’ applet for it, they only work on Mac OS X 10.3.. and I have 10.4, of course. Tech support was useless: no, they don’t have a 10.4 driver, no, they don’t know when, or even if, they plan to have one available. Some searching on Google and various message boards turned up an alternative driver, apparently made by the people who actually manufacture the chip set that’s inside the adapter. This one worked… to a point. For the past several weeks, I’ve gotten used to having to ‘re-activate’ my wireless connection on the Mac every 10 minutes or so. For some unknown reason, it would just lose the connection periodically, making web browsing, instant messaging, or file transfers very annoying, to say the least. I tried everything: checking to make sure it was getting proper signal, tweaking the type of authentication I used (From WPA with a max-sized key to low-grade WEP, to just plain old open access, and back), I tried tweaking the settings on the Mac and the Router both, but nothing worked. I would just keep getting kicked off.

But no longer. It was a fluke, one of those things I never would have thought to try: while going through the App menu on the Mac the other night, I noticed that the Belkin ‘Wireless manager’, the one I’d tried to install originally which was for 10.3, was still installed. On a lark, I decided to click on it and see what would happen. And lo and behold, it worked! It came up, pretty as you please, detected my wireless network, even used the WPA settings I had originally put into the other no-name ‘Wireless manager’. And 5 hours of random web surfing, IM’ing, and downloading later, it’s still rock solid. I’ve tested it all over the place, with transfers on the internal network, external net access, and it works like a charm. So, apparently, the secret to getting the Belkin USB Wireless Adapter that I bought to work is as follows:

• Install the Belkin 10.3 drivers and application.
• Install the RALink 10.4 drivers and application
• Insert USB Wireless Adapter, RALink Wireless Manager will recognize it and come up.
• Kill the RALink Wireless Manager, and bring up the Belkin Wireless Manager.
• Ta-dah! Working and stable wireless access on your Mac using OS X 10.4 and the Belkin Adapter!

… and here I thought having a Mac would make my life simpler.