Saving an old iBook G4 from the grave

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A few years ago my girlfriend bought an iBook G4 and it was abandoned within the first year as it succumbed to a very common problem; kernel panics caused by a faulty airport / bluetooth combo card.

I tried just about every trick I could think of to fix this problem as (unusually in my experience) Apple had refused to recognize the issue. Many visits to the Apple support forums and various other forums buried deep within the Google results seemed to point to the fact that the card was simply not seated correctly on the logic board and a folded piece of card placed between the airport card and the plastic brace would fix it. In many cases this seemed to work a treat, and for a day or so worked for me, but then the dreaded kernel panics came back... again!

I then decided that I would buy a USB WiFi dongle, but finding a decent Mac compatible device would prove difficult. Initially I bought a cheap 'solution' on eBay, a Pluscom wifi dongle that advertised itself as being mac compatible, but there was a problem from the off, the drivers came on a stupid mini CDROM that wont work in a slot loading drive (so much for the sellers claim of being a solution for all iBooks!) Not one to be detered I tried to find the drivers on the Pluscom site, only to find there wasn't much of a site but after some digging I found the drivers, installed them and... nothing. The dongle just would not find a network, and my MacBook Pro always finds about 5 or 6 nearby.

And so to the point of this blog post, I finally found one that works and works well, a Sitecom WL-182 300N. This dongle doesn't mention Mac compatibility on the packaging at all but ignore this, while in the store I pulled out my trusty iPhone and Googled it to see if anything came up, sure enough there was a download for the Mac OSX UB driver on Sitecom's Customer Support section, a 5Mb download and voila! We are back online, this dongle was £29.99 from Maplin but you may be able to find it cheaper elsewhere on the internet, I just didn't have anymore patience left!

I now have a fixed iBook which means I wont have to go and buy a little netbook and hack to bits to run OSX...