MAXpower USB WiFi Stick on OSX

I recently broke my “don’t buy old Macs” rule. I picked up a Power Mac G4 “Quicksilver” Dual 800 on craigslist for $130 for the system, complete with keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Ordinarily I wouldn’t go vintage mac like this, but this machine will be for the neighbor kids to play with when they are over here visiting. They enjoy playing Flash games, and it will I hope (please!!) keep them away from my precious Macbook Pro.

All’s well with this old mac. It’s surprisingly peppy given its minimal memory and dual G4s. Or so it seems ’till I launch Flash Player 10 for the first time and try to play an arcade-style game. Hmmm, maybe this wasn’t such a great idea…

Anyway, the Power Mac desperately needs 802.11g wifi. I googled around and didn’t see much by way of mainstream Mac USB wifi solutions that are 802.11g and low cost. Then I discovered the Newer Technologies MaxPower 802.11g/b USB wireless stick, and decided to give it a shot. I found this one over at Other World Computing at a pretty fair price. 

Features and specs:

1. It offers 802.11g and b and various flavors of security: 64/128/152 bit WEP, WPA, WPA2, WPA-PSK/WPA-PSK2
2. Operating Channels: 1 thru 11
3. It’s a little longer than your average USB thumb drive at 3.5″ in length

Box Contents: 

1. USB WiFi Stick
2. Driver CD with OSX 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5 drivers (also includes Windows & linux drivers –which I did not test)
3. Instruction booklet

What's in the box

Simple OSX WiFi Setup: 

1. Load the CD, install the driver for the version of mac OSX you’re running 
2. Reboot
3. Open System Preferences and choose “Network”
4. Click “OK” in the “Detected a new network port” dialog box
5. Click “Apply” and close system preferences
6. Plug the USB WiFi stick into a USB port, and the Wireless Utility application launches
7. Click on the name of the Wifi network you want to use, click “Add Profile”, enter your WEP/WPA password
8. Click “Activate”
9. Start surfing the internet

The install process was that simple.

Network Utility displaying the site survey

Hardware:

The unit is built like a standard memory stick. It feels sturdy and has a tiny LED that flashes to indicate data is being transmitted.

Software:

3rd party devices like this live or die based on the quality of their drivers and end user software. I’m happy to report that Newer seems to have done a good job here. The install went very smoothly. The Wireless Utility is easy to understand and use. When you start your mac, the Wireless Utility launches, and connects to your network.  The connection is reliable and as fast as I can hope for given that I’m doing this all through old school USB 1.1.

Minor niggles:  Every time you boot up your mac, the Wireless Utility pops up front and center and shows you that it has connected to the network. Not a very Mac-like user experience. Bugs: I did experience one instance where I booted up the mac and the Wireless Utility had forgotten my network’s WEP. 

Performance:

I did a quick speed test using www.speakeasy.net. Results are equivalent to the speed I see using my Macbook Pro when It’s plugged into the cable modem powered ethernet here (~4.4 Mbps down, ~350 Kbps up). Web surfing is still noticeably slower than on my Macbook Pro. However, I currently have the wifi stick plugged into the stock USB 1.1 port on my Power Mac.  Newer Technology warns that throughput will be slower using a 1.1 port. Next upgrade: an inexpensive USB 2.0 card. Either that or a shiny new Mac Mini!

Conclusion:

Overall, I’m very happy with the performance, ease of set-up and cost. 

Test System:

Power Mac G4 Dual 800 Running OSX 10.4.11. Wireless base station: Apple Airport Express, version 6.3.