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<FONT FACE="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'>After accepting a Verizon DSL upgrade to 1500/384 in Boston last month, the quality of my DSL service fell off markedly from what I had enjoyed with 750/XXX for several years. Click search on anything in Google and Safari stalls for 5 to 45 seconds, then eventually downloads rapidly. Speed tests at DSL Reports are great, once they start, but it’s the “starting” that’s unremittingly problematic.<BR>
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Verizon Tech Support suggested my previous router — a MacSense XRouter Pro MIH 130 — was the culprit, asserting that it was too old to handle the “more powerful” signal of 1500 down. So I bought a Belkin Wireless G Router yesterday, connected up my G4, my son’s Dell Dimension 4100 running WinXP and then tied in my new PowerBook 15-inch so that my wife access the internet, too. <BR>
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That was yesterday, when everything worked fine. Last night I ran Software Update on the PowerBook and downloaded wirelessly about seven software updates from the Apple server. Then, I shut down.<BR>
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Today, everyone wanted to get onto the internet at the same time, but the PowerBook would not connect. The Airport Extreme icon showed a little box instead of the radio waves icon, and three hours of fiddling with configurations and searching the internet from my G4 for advice has got me nowhere. <BR>
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I suppose with last night’s software upgrades I wiped out some configuration data that enables the Airport Extreme card to “find” the Belkin Router and establish the internet connection. But I’m at my wits end, and the pertinent pages in the PowerBook documentation leave me feeling like I missed the introductory networking course and have stumbled into a discussion of the second semester material. <BR>
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This is very different from my experience in Anaheim last month: while I was searching through my room for the missing ethernet cable to connect via the Marriott’s internet service, my PowerBook automatically found the wireless signal from the Hilton across the street!<BR>
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Isn’t that the way my home network connection is supposed to work? It did last night.<BR>
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Sam Bays<BR>
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