OWC Father's Day Deals

From OWC's George Cole, "Got some great specials this week! Fathers day is Sunday so make some time for Dad, and buy him lot's of computer stuff;) Dad's like that."

-- TGIF, June 16 --

Hands-On Report--AirPort 1.2 Updater: The new updater was applied yesterday to our iBook and iMac DV/SE and then to our PowerBook 2400c. We used the downloaded installer on the iBook and it updated the firmware in our Base Station to v3.64 (not 3.60 as originally reported--thanks Dana Baggett) and Open Transport files to v2.6.2 along with the AirPort software to v1.2. We used Mac OS 9.0.4's Software Update control panel to get AirPort 1.2 for the iMac. The installer wouldn't work on our 2400c with a Lucent Orinoco (formerly WaveLAN) Silver Turbo PC card so we used TomeViewer to extract the AirPort PC Card v1.2 extension. We then copied OT 2.6.2, AirPort control strip module,AirPort Administration Utility and AirPort Admin Library extension from the iBook. All three computers are running Mac OS 9.0.4 and AirPort 1.2 works perfectly on them. The AirPort 1.2 control strip indicators of signal strength all show 5 green dots and occasionally 4 where they used to show only 2 or 3 with AirPort 1.1. File transfers are much faster, much nearer the performance of the hardwired portion of our 10b-T Ethernet.

A note on PowerPage questions whether the 2-3 dot increase in the control strip indicator is a real increase in signal reception since if the v1.1 control strip module is reinstalled then the indicator loses 2-3 dots. We haven't tried that but if one opens the Administration Utility and goes to the "Optimize Placement..." window, our 2400c with v1.1 used to show fair to good quality with the strength indicator bar at 20-40 per cent but with v1.2 the quality is strong and the strength is over 80 per cent. I suppose that Apple could have rescaled all these measures but the most important feature of v1.2 is that the file transfer rate is much improved and that is sufficient for us.