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Hi there I bought an old G4 in good condition, has airport built in. It is also 80GBHDD, and is running Leopard 10.5.8. Has 1GB ram. Anyway is good working order when plugged into Ethernet straight from modem, but I cant get it to pick up the Airport express 802.11n Wi-Fi 4th generation, that was given to me. Am I right in guessing that this should run of the modem Ethernet cable, instead of both of them being plugged in. Sorry rephrase that. I should only have one cable going from router to Airport, and not two, or what’s the point. It says all set up and has green light, but will not pick up internet. Also I wanted to ask, is there any point in having this Airport express 802.11n Wi-Fi 4th generation. If I decide to get rid of the mac mini, as it cant be used for streaming. I have newer mac devices, and was going to use mac mini for a server, but not much of a TV server. I do not know what to use the Airport for, as I have fibre optic and that seems to be fast, and picks up all my new macs. Any ideas what I can use it for as I am new to these, and also how to get it working if possible on G4 tried everything. Really sorry for long question. Regards Cap
Not sure I follow you here. You should be able to connect your Mac mini either via the Ethernet connection to your Ethernet hub which connects to your Internet connection (FiOS fiber) or via WiFi but you need to have a working WiFi connection. Do you have a WiFi Access Point (AP) that allow you to access the internet? Does your FiOS router offer a compatible connection option? It might not, you see your Mac mini uses 802.11b/g and some AP units don’t support these older standards or need to turn them on. As to what this system is able to be used for. It’s a good starter system but it has limits as the OS and the applications that run on it are no longer supported by Apple and 3rd party applications. So what you have on your system is what you have. Update (10/03/2015) OK, so it does connect, but only via an Ethernet connection. So we know the the issue is focused on the WiFi aspect of the connection. Just to be clear here you can’t have both connections Ethernet & WiFi active at the sometime accessing the SAME pathway to the internet. So make sure you disconnect the Ethernet Cable from the Mini when we are testing things with WiFi and I would recommend restarting the system between the different connections. Now we need to focus on the WiFi connection. You’ll need to open up the Routers (WiFi AP) settings and see if the 802.11b/g option is enabled. You can try running a WiFi scanner so you can see the AP’s WiFi access by frequency and connections allowed. You also may have an issue with WEP2 or WPA connections as they older systems only supported the older WEP standard. You’ll need to open up the AP to allow unsecured connections which for testing would not be a big worry. But if you plan to leave it open you could expose your systems as well as allow others access to your internet connection. Heres a good tool: WiFi Explorer. You’ll need to use this on a OS-X 10.7 or newer system. Sadly I can’t aim you to an older app for you Mini.
