Macbook wireless problems

All of a sudden my macbook has started having trouble with wireless network, i finally sorted the G5s wireless and the iphone has never had any problems with the wireless, i have tried moving the router every where in case of interference, but the result is the same, network diagnostics shows top 3 lights green and bottom 3 lights alternate between green and yellow, the wireless signal strength between 70 and 90%, but it will work normally upstairs. Its only the one computer that's giving grief. Are the any programs that will test the wireless, or could someone please offer any advice on the problem.

Try changing the channel the router uses in case of interference.

Thanks that worked, although i've had to change routers as i got the same result on all channels with the one i had been using, as it only had 7 to choose from, so am now using a airport express, and have found a channel seems to stay connected, so thank you again.

I have had no end of trouble with my macbook wireless. It would continually drop connections. The lastest updates seems to have made it more stable. The signal is always max but it just decides, randomly, that it isn't going to talk to the network any more. It won't reconnect either and claims a time out. The older imac in the same room is flawless as is the old ibook I have. The newer macbook has always been really flakey.

Update to the latest airport client and see if that helps. Then it is probably contact apple care time and they will probably want to get you to completely reinstall mac os X before they will bother to do much apart from getting you to remove the network and re-add it again which won't do a darn thing.

Either the macbook wireless hardware is fundamentally flawed as other people I know also have problems with it or there is a bug in mac os X that is tripped by a particular action which makes the wireless network drop. The same macbook is perfectly happy on a wired connection and doesn't lose that so it is definitely a wireless issue rather than a general networking issue.

What make of router do you have?

I'm using the netgear 834N but now i've got it linked by ethernet to the apple express it works most of the time, the g5 sometimes has issues though its sitting right on top of the router, but the macbook is working fine.

There have been reports of intermittant wireless issues on various versions of Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 and certain Airport cards. Because the problems can be so sporadic and difficult to predict, it's often difficult to diagnose and commonly misunderstood as a configuration or hardware issue.

I experienced a problem for several weeks where even when the signal was good, the connection would repeatedly drop and wouldn't re initiate correctly (doesn't accept password and times out)

The fix is to replace the Airport driver with an OLDER version depending on what Mac OS X version you have installed. What version do you have installed? and I'll post some links that solved the problem completely for me.

I've got a netgear wireless router too. I suppose it's possible that there is some feature of the wireless which the macbook doesn't like.

That's exactly what mine is doing. I can't remember whether it did it from brand new. I certainly remember installing a wireless client update last year and it going rubbish from then on. It's just dropped it now and won't reconnect. Sometimes even a reboot won't fix it then it is a real PITA.

Running 10.5.6
Have broadcom BCM43xx 1.0 (5.10.38.27) airport card
Basestation agent is 1.5.1 (latest)
Airport utility is 5.4.1 (latest)

The previous versions didn't work either.

Just used the system applications to find versions. Is there another way of finding out which airport client is being used as basestation agent and airport utility don't seem quite the right thing?

I've been doing a bit more reading and it seems there has been a raft of people complaining about Airport issues after the 10.5.6 update, which some people are claiming irreversibly updates the Airport card firmware on certain cards.

In doing so, the card no longer works at all on older Airport card drivers found in previous Mac OS X versions! So for this reason, I'd recommend against fiddling around with the drivers unless you want to live dangerously!
Having been warned, if anyone does want to attempt this: you need Pacifist and the combo update for Mac OS X (10.5.4 for example) from Apples website. Use pacifier to extract the driver included in the updater file and reboot.

If I recall correctly, the issues that plagued Mac OS X 10.4 and early version of 10.5 were related to some drivers allowing the card to into different power saving /polling modes, which caused flakey behavior on some Airport cards. I'm not sure if this is still a problem on newer Macs, but I've certainly come across it on many plastic MacBooks and previous general MacBook Pros.

Always try the easy stuff first, like updating your wireless routers firmware, resetting it, deleting your Airport preference files and deleting keychain entries for wireless networks.

There are plenty of people talking about all of the above on Apples support forums here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=18...
Definitely worthy of a read if you have the time!

Regarding the software for Apple basestations - I don't use an Apple basestation personally, but I have often found the configuration applications a bit odd to use, If I configure an Airport express to join an Airport Network as a client I can only seem to re-configure it or change settings if I perform a factory reset on it. I'd definitely recommend resetting them to see if that helps as a misconfiguration can't always be fixed any other way!

Edited by deleted (Tue 14-Apr-09 19:57:17)

Updated the firmware on the router. I did notice that mine and next door's network are both on the same channel (6). Can't seem to force mine to a different one though which I think might help.

I have noticed the wireless is most likely to die when the laptop has either just woken up or was about to nod off. Will try turning off sleep and see whether that helps.

The air radar utility is really handy. Next door's wireless is unencrypted, hee hee.