Losing his cables

Posted on 2 Jul 2002 at 17:13

Jon Honeyball changes allegiance by cashing in the beloved PC for a Mac! No, he hasn't lost his mind - only his cable. He also attempts to get some order out of Windows 2000

A pile of applets, utilities and hardware has come my way this month and I thought I'd deal with them all in one column. To start with, I've found the ideal laptop for my purposes and it turns out to be a Macintosh. Before going any further I must reassure you that I haven't flipped my lid or done anything daft, but it's become clear to me that, for the time being at least, of all the devices I have in my lab the iBook laptop is the one for me. That's not to say I love it (I don't) nor that it can't be improved on (it most certainly can), but it was the first device to give me a certain key piece of functionality that has become an essential part of my day-to-day working and that I now couldn't do without. I could buy a PC laptop and have this functionality too, but my iBook is already bought and paid for. So excuse my meanness for the moment.

The key piece of functionality I'm referring to is wireless networking. Tethering a laptop to an Ethernet cable has always struck me as a mildly daft thing to do. I keep an old Toshiba Libretto 100 next to my bed, as it's just the right size for a quick bit of Web browsing just before snoozing, but the problem is the cabling. I went through a succession of PC Card network adaptors, breaking each one in turn. The card itself was usually fine, but the short adaptor cable always seemed to snap off.

My solution to this particular problem was Xircom's excellent RealPort adaptor, which takes the Ethernet feed right into the card itself: after nearly a year I've failed to break the card or the cable, which must count as a success. But to go wireless was always the big dream. Given that battery life on laptops has been steadily improving, it's now possible to get around seven to nine hours out of a well-specified laptop, and with the mains lead gone, getting rid of the Ethernet has to be the next big goal.

I needed to buy an iBook for a completely unrelated matter, but I soon fell in love with its quirky design, the bold blue colour, excellent keyboard, large and clear display, and the battery life looked excellent too. Its provision of on-board 100Mb Ethernet puts most PC laptops to shame, but getting rid of that cable was a primary goal. Then Apple announced the AirPort system and I knew this was the way forward.

The AirPort system consists of PC Card devices that you fit into your computer, together with a very modern-looking base unit that you plug into the Ethernet. If you want to do shared dial-up, it has a 56K modem built in too. Actually, purchasing this PC Card and base unit from Apple proved a major pain as the on-line ordering system seems completely brain dead, and deadlines can pass and disappear without so much as an email of apology or explanation. However, it finally arrived and fitting it into the iBook was very easy - you just lift up the keyboard and slide in the card, connecting the aerial feed at the same time. Current iMac/Books have the aerials built in, so you don't even need to worry about that.

Configuring the base unit is done via the radio waves from your selected Apple desktop or laptop unit, and it's an almost no-brainer operation, which entails you setting up your connection on your computer and then transferring it to the AirPort BaseStation. The base then acts as a NAT (Network Address Translation) box and the computers get put into the 10.0.0.x address range, as far as I can see. However, the configuration utility can be a pain if you want to change the IP address of the base unit, and I battled with this until I happened to try changing the network name too, when the system immediately sprang into life.

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