Edimax EW-7711UAn Works With Issues

[shkm]

Last night I was able to get my few-year-old system up and running with 10.6.8 thanks to all you fine people! It was certainly less painless and more fruitful than my experiences with my Inspiron 1525. Anyhow, whilst the vast majority of things do work, one major problem is with the wireless.

 

My wireless PCI card (Belkin F5D7000uk v3000, RT2500 chipset) doesn't work, so I plugged in an Edimax EW-7711UAn – which I believe runs on the Ralink RT3070 chipset – and installed the USB(RT2870 /RT2770 /RT3X7X /RT537X) v1.4.4.0 drivers for 10.6.

 

I created a profile and I'm able to connect and achieve great speeds, but every now and then the Ralink WirelessUtility will pop up with a spinning beachball. I can continue doing what I like on the machine, but the wireless will no longer be working. Any attempt to use the WirelessUtility results in a massive delay, with the persisting beachball. Even closing and re-opening the process does not help; the only thing that fixes it is a reboot.

 

Unfortunately this is rather hard to troubleshoot as I haven't found a single thing that triggers it – it just happens sometimes. I'll try to keep you posted if I do figure something out.

 

Anyway, has anyone else experienced this? Does anyone know of a fix? I've a few more questions too, but I think they're best saved for other topics.

 

Other possibly relevant specs follow.

 

Retail SL 10.6 -> 10.6.8 with Combo Update

Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3l rev 2.0 (latest BIOS)

Intel Q6600 (stock)

Geforce 8800 GT

Audigy 2 ZS

 

DSDT.aml generated with DSDT Auto-Patcher (supports my mobo)

8800GT QE/CI with GraphicsEnabler

Audigy 2 ZS enabled with kX Drivers 1.11b0

 

/Extra/Extensions

AHCIPortInjector

Disabler (used in an attempt to fix something else, will go to another post with it)

FakeSMC

IOAHCIBlockStorageInjector

JMicron36xATA (for my IDE DVD-RW)

 

org.chameleon.Boot.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>GenerateCStates</key>
<string>Yes</string>
<key>GeneratePStates</key>
<string>Yes</string>
<key>Kernel</key>
<string>mach_kernel</string>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string></string>
<key>GraphicsEnabler</key>
<string>Yes</string>
<key>DropSSDT</key>
<string>Yes</string>
<key>Timeout</key>
<string>2</string>
</dict>
</plist>

 

smbios.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>SMbiosdate</key>
<string>02/29/08</string>
<key>SMbiosversion</key>
<string>MP31.88Z.006C.B05.0802291410</string>
<key>SMboardproduct</key>
<string>Mac-F42C88C8</string>
<key>SMfamily</key>
<string>MacPro</string>
<key>SMmanufacturer</key>
<string>Apple Inc.</string>
<key>SMproductname</key>
<string>MacPro3,1</string>
<key>SMserial</key>
<string>G88014V4XYK</string>
</dict>
</plist>

 

tl;dr: WirelessUtility stalls at random, halp plz.

[Noam AA]

........

 

i have EW-7711UMn, it runs RT2870, but it doesn't matter i think.

i will tell you my experience was, from the first time i had troubles with this wifi card,

at first it worked like a charm, but not for too long.

in some cases it didn't reconnect after sleep, or didn't work at all, when in non working condition in some cases replug worked, and when in working condition in some cases replug breaks wifi.

 

it says its OSX supported, but it very much limited, and driver is a mess, causing my usb to be unfunctional sometimes and after i realized that, and had enough with troubles, i replaced with genuine apple wifi card, and !, all troubles are gone

[shkm]

i have EW-7711UMn, it runs RT2870, but it doesn't matter i think.

i will tell you my experience was, from the first time i had troubles with this wifi card,

at first it worked like a charm, but not for too long.

in some cases it didn't reconnect after sleep, or didn't work at all, when in non working condition in some cases replug worked, and when in working condition in some cases replug breaks wifi.

 

it says its OSX supported, but it very much limited, and driver is a mess, causing my usb to be unfunctional sometimes and after i realized that, and had enough with troubles, i replaced with genuine apple wifi card, and !, all troubles are gone

 

I've actually ordered the parts to make an Airport compatible card :-). Since postage from China will take quite some time, though, I'd love to get this up and running acceptably.

 

Some progress: the disconnect issue always triggers when iTunes is run. It's not the only thing that does it, but 100% of the time if I launch iTunes, the dongle disconnects and WirelessUtility stalls.

 

I've also found a way to get it working again without a reboot: close the offending app (iTunes in my tests), unplug the dongle, delete the WLAN entry in the Network panel, plug the dongle back in and add the WLAN entry again. At least it's a bit less hassle than rebooting!

 

Is there any easier way to narrow the problem down, knowing that iTunes causes it to crash?

 

Edit:: Just tried removing afpfs.kext and asp_tcp.kext from /System/Library/Filesystems/AppleShare as per a diff between system profiler before and after running iTunes. Didn't help, but worth mentioning.

[shkm]

Some updates, in addition to the iTunes discovery.

 

For the whole day I've been working with various apps (not iTunes) without a single internet hiccup. So I decided to load up Fidelia and I got disconnected! Seeing the pattern, I tried out Clementine too, and was disconnected. These all share one thing in common: they're all media/music players. The disconnection came into effect immediately after starting the applications, without the need to load up any music.

 

Interestingly, I was able to play music (via the iTunes library, no less) through both Decibel and Quicktime. In fact, I'm playing music through QT as I type this.

 

So what's the connection? I know that QT is a large part of the OS X architecture and assume that many players (other than the obvious iTunes) rely on it, however surely that's not the problem if I'm able to play music through QT! Any ideas?

 

I strongly doubt that this is a coincidence. I've run countless apps throughout the day – from Billings to Photoshop, Forklift to Textmate – and haven't had any problems.

[Noam AA]

if you have iPod/iphone you may just want to wifi tether to you pc until the apple wifi will come

i did it for 3 weeks and can tell you it no hassle at all, just plug and play , no reboots no spinning ball no nothing

just try to find an alternative, it's way better then this headache

[shkm]

if you have iPod/iphone you may just want to wifi tether to you pc until the apple wifi will come

i did it for 3 weeks and can tell you it no hassle at all, just plug and play , no reboots no spinning ball no nothing

just try to find an alternative, it's way better then this headache

Hmm... you're right, maybe I can figure something out. I don't have a smart phone but I could share the connection with a netbook or something. And that way I'd also be able to ensure that the problem is or isn't the wireless itself – given how strange this problem is, it could be anything.

 

Thanks for the suggestion!