Trouble Activating Your iPhone? You Don’t Happen to Have a 64-bit OS, Do You?

Remember how difficult it was for Apple and Microsoft to get iTunes working on Vista? Well, that was only 32-bit Vista that they got it to work on. Realization coming now? You can’t use iTunes on 64-bit XP or Vista, so you also can’t activate your iPhone.

Now, it does say it in the minimum system requirements specification on Apple’s website. ‘Course it’s buried in the fine print, and I missed it the first time I looked. I would have made it bold print, myself. And if you look in the technical specifications (at the time of this writing; I wouldn’t be surprised if they update it soon), it lists Vista and XP, but says nothing about 32-bit vs. 64-bit.

Actually, this says less about Apple than about what I’ve been telling anyone who asks me … do not use 64-bit Windows XP or Windows Vista yet. There are simply too many things that do not work yet. On the other hand, if you simply want to activate your iPhone, I guess you could borrow a friend’s PC.

Draft 802.11n Still a Neighborhood Killer?

After getting my Dell XPS M1710 late last year, and noting that it had a built-in 802.11n mini-PCI card, I decided to make the jump to Draft n. Now, I’d already heard that 802.11n had problems with stomping on your neighbor’s older wifi, but I’d also heard the Draft 2.0 spec was supposed to take care of that. However, it seems things may not be quite up to snuff yet.

I spent a few days last week testing a D-Link DIR-655 router and DWA-652 Cardbus card, which are based on Atheros XSPAN silicon. These are the first products to have firmware and drivers posted that allegedly implement 11n Draft 2.0 compliance. My primary focus was to see whether the legacy protection mechanisms added in 802.11n Draft 2.0 were working in actual product.

My initial tests didn’t look very promising and after some back-and-forth with D-Link, I’m even less encouraged. I’ll have full details in an upcoming review, but basically I see no sign that the Clear Channel Assessment (CCA) mechanism added in Draft 2.0 is working properly. Source: SmallNetBuilder

The problem is that 802.11n uses an extension channel to get extra speed. If there’s a legacy (say 802.11g) network in the area, older versions of the standard would stomp on it, creating the “bad neighbor” result. In the new standard, if a legacy device is detected on the extension channel, the router is supposed to back off to using the legacy-friendly 20 MHz channel mode. According to the tests in the article, it’s not yet doing that. Well, I haven’t gotten any complaints yet, even though my router has not yet been certified or received a firmware upgrade to Draft 2.0. And I see plenty of wi-fi networks in my neighborhood. Hopefully I’m not affecting anyone, though I’m not going to tell you where I live, just in case …