Help me

What is the PC Card looking connection on the motherboard of my PowerMac G4?

20 thoughts on “Help me

  1. you can get an airport card (the same one as used in the powerbooks, ibooks, and imac (and airport base station. ;] )) and drop it in there without losing a pci slot.

    AFAIK, it’s not a full PCMCIA slot… it’s only for the airport card. (notice the antenna wire ending near it?)

    OS X 10.2 and higher has a control panel thingy (in ‘networking’ i believe) for sharing your wired internet connection over 802.11b or vice versa. just fyi. :)

    1. Any word on whether or not I can use 3rd party 802.11 cards in that slot? Cuz the official airport card is like $100 and I can find 3rd party ones for like $50

      1. i dunno. like i said, i’m pretty sure it’s not a complete PC Card slot…

        not to mention that if you get a $50 card, and upgrade your system, there’s always a chance that it won’t work again until they update the drivers for it. Apple brand cards are sure to always work.

        welcome to the world of macintosh. :P

          1. yes you can use some of the orinoco cards, theres drivers for them, if you search for wardriving stuff you can find out the model #..

            i got my airport card for $65 new from eshop.macsales.com, but they havnt had anymore in stock since i got mine (i think it was the last one)

      2. It reminds me of having my saab. It was always expensive to maintain, but if you sank some money into it occasionally, it would run like a tank.

        I know that you hate Aqua, but one thing that I really noticed over Microsoft-based computers is that the OS doesn’t get in my way nearly as much as it does with M$. (and i’m not constantly tweaking it like a Linux install.) Everything just kind of works, and it’s all quite stable, and crashes a lot less.

        It costs a lot more, but you pay for the convenience of having a stable, somewhat more secure OS.

        of course… all OS’s suck, since all computers suck. ;)

        1. I have actually been having lots of headaches with OSX lately… About a week ago things randomly (like almost every entry in the Apple menu, as well as the keyboard volume keys worked, but their on-screen display didn’t nor did the audible feedback when you press the keys) stopped working… I asked around on macfixit.com to no avail, so I eventually decided to reinstall OSX… I chose a “save my users and settings” install, and after the install was finished I still had the problem.

          Then one day I noticed at the login screen that the volume OSD worked there, so I created a new user, and logged in as that user. Everything worked hunky-dory from then on… And I hadn’t installed any hacks or any of that “dangerous” stuff.

          In addition, I have noticed that often it takes an obscene amount of time for applications to start… Like 10 seconds for the calculator?? It’s a god damned calculator.

          1. Clarification: Everything for the new user worked hunky dory, the original user is still fucked.

            And the slow-start nonsense isn’t just for starting new applications… Sometimes I will tell terminal to open a new window and it takes 15 seconds for it to do so (the whole while terminal is frozen until the new window opens).

        2. And I don’t hate Aqua in particular… I just hate all the annoyingly cycle-wasting genie effects and what-not. I think that Apple’s font anti-aliasing system looks much better than XPs, and I think the UI isn’t that shabby once you switch to the graphite color scheme.. ;)

          1. well, you can change the ‘genie’ effect to ‘zoom’ and get rid of dock magnification and such.

            Hey, it could be worse… it could be “Enlightenment”!

            Although, I’d personally love to have a WMX/WM2 like interface on it. :)

            1. Shhh.. don’t tell anyone, but for all of my bitching, I think that dock magnification is cool… :)

              And I have genie switched to zoom, but I would be even happier if the window just blinked out of existance without any flair when I pressed minimize.

      3. Internally, the Airport card is a repackaged Lucent Orinoco Gold.

        Whether it would work in the internal Airport slot with its slightly odd pin, or if you’d have to use the normal PCMCIA slot, though… I can’t say for certain. No guarantees, but there’s a good chance it would work.

        People have reported success using Orinoco cards on the PBG4’s PC card slot, though.

          1. Sorry; somehow, I thought you had a laptop… my bad.

            Looking around, an Orinoco Gold goes for $68; I could purchase an Airport card for you from the RIT/Apple store for $93. The $25 price difference isn’t huge, despite being 27%, all things considered…

            1. Sorry; somehow, I thought you had a laptop… my bad.

              No sweat… I just realized that I never actually mentioned GETTING the machine or what it was… So I just posted an entry describing the situation here.

              Looking around, an Orinoco Gold goes for $68; I could purchase an Airport card for you from the RIT/Apple store for $93. The $25 price difference isn’t huge, despite being 27%, all things considered…

              Agreed… And apple’s price for the card is $99, so the $6 savings would be annilhated by postage and inconvience… Thanks for the offer though!

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