WIFI causing mudbath?

[Chris Lapsley]

Hi team... whiffy glitches. Does anybody else suffer from this ailment?
I recently graduated from Mac 9x to OS10.3.9 (designated ‘Pangolin’ I think) running on an iBook 500MHz PowerPC G3 with 384MB SDRAM on board. Memory: 5.5gb free / 3.8gb in use.
The problem: I can’t get WIFI to run continuously. With a new Cisco Wireless-G Linksys ADSL gateway (WAG54G-EU) everything works just fine when cabled straight into a USB slot.
But... with the wireless D-Link (DWL-122) and a signal 75% to 95% of full strength, Skype and Safari connect smoothly and work beautifully.... for a while... but within 5 minutes it all goes pear shaped. First partial paralysis then full paralysis. Connections slow, then sever, even though the signal remains constant. It’s like driving through deep mud.
Take Skype out of the loop and things run OK for longer, maybe 20 mins then everything slows, I eventually lose all net connections and have to restart.
If live radio is streaming (Glasto’s on!) it all ends in a loop when the dreaded glitch hits.
From info in earlier postings 10X is not really supposed to need defraggin but I downloaded Omni DiscSweeper and Onyx anyway and couldn’t find anything I even understood, much less dared to delete except non-Roman fonts. (Plus old stuff still clinging to system 9x which isn’t partitioned, but that shouldn’t matter?).
What else should I look into?

The long term reason I’m trying to put together a solid WIFI (pronounced whiffy here) connection method is so I can find some way to remain e-connected when nowhere near anything other than a portable GRPS phone and a few 12 volt (truck-type) batteries.

[yellow]

I'd go to the nearest bar/coffee house with wifi and make sure your AirPort card is functioning correctly. If you drop off the network there, you can be sure that it's hardware/software on your Mac. Otherwise, clearly the problem is with the Cisco router.

What do the logs say about your network connections?

[Chris Lapsley]

Thank you muchly for your sage advice.
My nearest hot spot is many miles away but in any case the problem finally caused a major mudbath and I'm just putting myself back together now. I hope this gets through?!#$!%
Looking at the logs the problem seems to be that the Cisco router is operating at one speed and the wifi thingamy is replying at another speed thus any data packets that don't fit the jigsaw eventually cause the system to go into a spiralling data dance... then crash.
Having a fairly dirty copper line-in high up here in the mountains doesn't help. Oh for the clean green glass lines in towns like Bangkok!
So, I think the answer is to recalibrate the faster packet pusher so it matches the slower one more closely.
I'll try that and see what happens.
Thanks again.