Update: Problems with Oricoco silver

[IOXperts Support]

On Jan 21, 2004, at 8:13 PM, Dave Bonhoff wrote:
> Sorry for being irate, but the transition to X.3 has been anything but 
> smooth for me and the loss of WiFi has been adding to the stress, 
> particularly at work where I am the only Mac user.

I sympathize...

>  I have spent some time with some tech oriented people at work and 
> they are thinking that it is either a hardware issue that just 
> happened to manifest itself right after I registered the driver to the 
> card, or that the firmware was somehow corrupted and that the update 
> didn't correct this.

Either is possible, though the fact that it works partially is very odd.

> I've noticed that there are 2 different firmwares listed, PRI and STA. 
>  After the update, only STA had been upgraded.  Is this correct?

Yes.  It is possible to update the PRI firmware, but it gets updated 
much less frequently.  "PRI" stands for "primary", and consists of just 
those functions that allow the card's circuitry to boot up and start 
responding to commands (sort of like the BIOS on a PC).  "STA" stands 
for "station", and contains all of the 802.11 protocol handling.

> Could the PRI firmware still be the cause of the problem?

Unlikely--if the PRI firmware was corrupted, the card would not be 
functional at all.

>   I have also noticed that the signal strength bar shows 11Mbits when 
> using the SMC card, but not when using the Orinoco card.  Does that 
> imply anything or is it just a feature of the card?

This part of the preference panel depends on the card.  Intersil-based 
cards (like the SMC card) do report the current speed, but Lucent-based 
cards (like the Orinocos) do not.

> If we can't get the Orinoco cardworking, then I'm going to have to 
> switch to the SMC card that I have access to.  Would it be possible to 
> change my registration to that card?

No problem.  If you decide to do this, just send the MAC address of the 
SMC card to "support at ioxperts.com" and we'll generate a new serial 
number for you.

> The card refused to work this morning, but for some reason unknown to 
> me, the card has been working fine for about 2 hours now.

Stranger and stranger...


Amanda Walker
IOXperts, Inc.