Mac Book Follow Up.

[AdamZ]

First a HUGE thanks to Jason, Nate, Rich and all the others who responded to my post regarding my daughter's mac book freezing up and running slowly. There is good news and frustrating news.

First the good news. The installation of 4GB of Memory and a 128 gb SSD as Jason suggested really made the computer peppy again. Nate posted a link to some good "how to" instructions regarding the memory swap. Super easy. Thanks Nate.

The frustrating part is that out of the blue a couple of weeks prior to the memory upgrade the mac book started dropping the households WiFi. It became ever more difficult to log back on and she kept getting "timed out" messages.

The guy I had put in the SSD was super helpful and when the computer kept dropping the WiFi after the memory and SSD upgrade He took it back to put in a new air card. He had it for a few days and said it worked well all around his shop and house.

Well we get it home today and darn it if the same thing didn't happen again with the household WiFi. ( we have verizon by the way) Verizon remotely tested our router and said it was fine. The apple repair guy said their routers are slow and if it kept dropping to get a new router.

Now my daughter is relegated to using my spring MiFi mobile hot spot to connect but thats a real pain when it come to printing.

Anyone hear of this issue? Know of a fix, Its driving us nuts?

 

[wsuffa]

Replace the hotspot at home. There should be a way to use your own gear with Verizon's modem. Yes, some of the gear Verizon uses is crap.



Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

[AdamZ]

Bill I was just reading on the Mac forums that this is apparently a known problem with Macs. Odd thing is that it was fine for years and wham 3-4 years after getting the macbook it starts dropping.

We have a Toshiba PC laptop and two iPads on the same router and no problems. We have a Lexmark wireless printer that we have to keep switching the WiFi on depending upon whether we want to print of a computer on the verizon WiFi or the Spring MiFi Mobile hot spot. Talk about Pain in the posterior!

 

[comanchepilot]

The easiest thing for most people is to buy the apple router - its pricey but like most apple products it works - and lasts.

 

[JGoodish]

Now my daughter is relegated to using my spring MiFi mobile hot spot to connect but thats a real pain when it come to printing.

Anyone hear of this issue? Know of a fix, Its driving us nuts?

Most of the consumer routers are more or less junk, depending on the definition of the word "junk." I had a Linksys that lasted a few years before wireless connections became erratic and, eventually, the router just stopped passing traffic even when the wireless connection was working. I replaced the Linksys with a NetGear, which seemed to work okay, until I replaced it with an Apple Time Capsule because I wanted the integrated backup solution.

So, I have an almost new NetGear a/b/g/n router that I'll let you have for cheap I'd you're interested.


JKG

 

[rpadula]

Bill I was just reading on the Mac forums that this is apparently a known problem with Macs. Odd thing is that it was fine for years and wham 3-4 years after getting the macbook it starts dropping.

We have a Toshiba PC laptop and two iPads on the same router and no problems. We have a Lexmark wireless printer that we have to keep switching the WiFi on depending upon whether we want to print of a computer on the verizon WiFi or the Spring MiFi Mobile hot spot. Talk about Pain in the posterior!

IIRC, the Macbook got upgraded to Snow Leopard (10.6.x) somewhere in this process. Are you up to date with the software updates? Sometimes fixes happen, although now SL is two revisions behind (Lion/10.7, and Mountain Lion/10.8).

Your cheapest options are a refurbed Airport Express from Apple. The older one at $69 is probably fine for that vintage Macbook:

http://store.apple.com/us/product/F...express-base-station-with-80211n-and-airtunes

Or you could spring $85 for the newer dual-band model:

http://store.apple.com/us/product/FC414LL/A/airport-express-base-station-june-2012

Be warned: network setup is sometimes an even bigger pain in the @$$. Your easiest bet (and I know I'll get tomatoes thrown at me) is to connect the Apple router to your Verizon unit, put the Airport in dumb bridge mode, and let the VZ equipment hand out the IP addresses.

 

[denverpilot]

I've seen this problem be:

- a bad power supply on a Linksys router
- a bad WiFi card in a machine (by the way, these usually CAN be replaced in Macs, getting the part is the problem but they can be found)
- drivers that had gotten all bolloxed up on both Windows and Mac that an OS reload cleared up
- a bad antenna connector inside a laptop that wasn't really connected so signals were always weak

I have also seen where removing ALL wifi settings from a Mac (both in the UI and even possibly deleting the .plist file where they're stored and letting the OS rebuild it) and letting it rebuild/relearn networks, cleared something similar up.

(Essentially the same thing as an OS reload, really. Or doing the same thing from the machine's perspective.)

So I'm not sure where to start here.

Simplest is dumping the network and setting it up again. Settings->Network-> click on WiFi, click Advanced on bottom right, on one of the tabs on the next page you can remove wifi networks from the ones the Mac knows by clicking the minus sign after picking it from the list.

Probably smart to deselect "ask to join unknown networks" also and reboot after removing prior to re-adding it. Can turn it back on after that but I don't leave that setting on. I just click the wifi icon in the toolbar if I'm somewhere new where I would want to join a network I haven't before.

Also probably smart to find the network login/key in the Keychain app and remove that also, prior to reboot/rejoin so the machine can write that info fresh into the Keychain also. Can search by SSID in the top right corner of Keychain Access. Dump the keys and passwords.

Have the Admin/root password for the machine, the SSID and the password of the WiFi network handy before starting, since you'll need all of those.

I had a machine that refused to rejoin a wifi network after SLEEP mode (but would join at boot, and would join if I clicked on the Wifi icon on the toolbar and selected the network name) and dumping it and recreating it cleared that up.

 

[comanchepilot]

After DP's post - I'll then tell you that its 95% of the time the router crapping the bed - I've never had a router last more than a year - and its plugged into the battery backup so it gets pristine sine wave power.

The things are mostly cheap $3 circuit boards where the plastic units cost more and the cardboard packing more than the entire unit - with the power supply truly the lowest chinese bidder quality.

the apple things are not the fastest on the planet - the latest version [A1408] is ALOT better and faster and dual channel and all that - but its got a fixed limit of 50 connections - so if you have lots of friends make sure they sign in under the guest account where you can rest the mac addresses easier. Also - let your network card roam the band width - using 5G if possible since it is faster than 2.4 and it seems lots of microwaves have harmonics in the 2.4ghz channels.

The dedicated USB makes for good storage of music and photos - and you can assign a static IP to an ethernet connected printer and turn any printer into network printer - or you can use the dedicated USB printing system.

 

[AdamZ]

The easiest thing for most people is to buy the apple router - its pricey but like most apple products it works - and lasts.

Will the apple router work with Verizon FIOS?

IIRC, the Macbook got upgraded to Snow Leopard (10.6.x) somewhere in this process. Are you up to date with the software updates? Sometimes fixes happen, although now SL is two revisions behind (Lion/10.7, and Mountain Lion/10.8).

Your cheapest options are a refurbed Airport Express from Apple. The older one at $69 is probably fine for that vintage Macbook:

http://store.apple.com/us/product/F...express-base-station-with-80211n-and-airtunes

Or you could spring $85 for the newer dual-band model:

http://store.apple.com/us/product/FC414LL/A/airport-express-base-station-june-2012

Be warned: network setup is sometimes an even bigger pain in the @$$. Your easiest bet (and I know I'll get tomatoes thrown at me) is to connect the Apple router to your Verizon unit, put the Airport in dumb bridge mode, and let the VZ equipment hand out the IP addresses.

Rich, the is was upgraded to Lion when I has the SSD installed. Is the air port the same as the air card? I just has a new airport put in.

After DP's post - I'll then tell you that its 95% of the time the router crapping the bed - I've never had a router last more than a year - and its plugged into the battery backup so it gets pristine sine wave power.

The things are mostly cheap $3 circuit boards where the plastic units cost more and the cardboard packing more than the entire unit - with the power supply truly the lowest chinese bidder quality.

the apple things are not the fastest on the planet - the latest version [A1408] is ALOT better and faster and dual channel and all that - but its got a fixed limit of 50 connections - so if you have lots of friends make sure they sign in under the guest account where you can rest the mac addresses easier. Also - let your network card roam the band width - using 5G if possible since it is faster than 2.4 and it seems lots of microwaves have harmonics in the 2.4ghz channels.

The dedicated USB makes for good storage of music and photos - and you can assign a static IP to an ethernet connected printer and turn any printer into network printer - or you can use the dedicated USB printing system.

What you say makes sense except I can't figure out why all my other devices don't drop the WiFi.

 

[wsuffa]

Will the apple router work with Verizon FIOS?



Rich, the is was upgraded to Lion when I has the SSD installed. Is the air port the same as the air card? I just has a new airport put in.



What you say makes sense except I can't figure out why all my other devices don't drop the WiFi.

Adam,

My brother had similar problem with daughters MacBook. He ended up removing the SSID from the router and restricting access by MAC addresses. Eventually he replaced the router and all was fine. To Apple, "standards" means that Apple works with Apple gear, and if it happens to work with something else, that's a plus.

I've had routers crap out after a couple of years. I am using a Sonicwall router with an Asus access point at the moment. It's worked pretty well with the iPad, but replaced a Linksys that started off well, but had all kinds of issues after a couple of years.

It is my understanding that you can use your own router/access point with FIOS.

 

[JOhnH]

Have you tried updating your router's firmware? I have had this solve several really frustrating problems. And it is free. My wife was ready to throw her laptop in the trash until I did this.

 

[denverpilot]

What you say makes sense except I can't figure out why all my other devices don't drop the WiFi.

When you say "drop" is the wifi connection itself down, or is it up with no assigned DHCP IP address?

Machines dropping off a DHCP network is often a DIFFERENT device being misbehaved and not honoring DHCP lease times and the well-behaved machine dropping offline when a duplicate IP is detected.

For my home network, all my machines that are important to me, have static DHCP addresses assigned by MAC address. Only non-regularly used devices get a router-defined DHCP address from the pool.

If this is what's happening it would be in the error logs on her laptop in the Console app. Worth looking when it drops offline anyway. Might find something more obvious.

 

[AdamZ]

When you say "drop" is the wifi connection itself down, or is it up with no assigned DHCP IP address?

Machines dropping off a DHCP network is often a DIFFERENT device being misbehaved and not honoring DHCP lease times and the well-behaved machine dropping offline when a duplicate IP is detected.

For my home network, all my machines that are important to me, have static DHCP addresses assigned by MAC address. Only non-regularly used devices get a router-defined DHCP address from the pool.

If this is what's happening it would be in the error logs on her laptop in the Console app. Worth looking when it drops offline anyway. Might find something more obvious.

Nate, the WiFi signal remains up,it's the Mac that drops the signal or connection as all my other devices, PC lap top and two iPads remain connected.

 

[denverpilot]

Nate, the WiFi signal remains up,it's the Mac that drops the signal or connection as all my other devices, PC lap top and two iPads remain connected.

Yeah, I mean is the receive indicator going to "zero bars" in the tool bar on the Mac, or does it still have signal bars but the Mac won't talk to anything?

If you go into Networking in the Settings, is there a green ball icon next to the wifi listing when it's not working, or some other color?

Here's yet another thing I've run into. Comcast modem/routers have a feature they call "gateway smart packet detection".

No good technical documentation of it anywhere, but everyone says they have problems if its turned on.

Might look for similarly worded meaningless gobbledegook in your carrier's modem/router.

 

[gkainz]

I saw bugs reported in Apple support a couple of years ago on running dual band Time Capsule WiFi ... iirc, had something to do with Guest Access enabled.

I experienced numerous drops with an older MacBook that only connected in the 2.4Ghz band, but newer devices continued to operate while connected to the 5Ghz band (I had guest access disabled). Relevent? (I didn't review this thread from the top)