Intermittent WIFI with Leopard on Macbook

It's an issue but not with all MacBooks. How many is hard to tell since this sampling is of people complaining. When random shutdown was a problem, it was clearly an issue with a number of machines and Apple was scrambling to figure it out.

I couldn't even get tech support to tell me if it was common to all of macbooks or only some. I'm sure everyone else has run into the same problem. I even asked how long I should wait before I try and exchange it. If i knew for sure that it was a problem with all then it wouldn't be worth exchanging it. but since i just got it through amazon, im sure they would let me exchange it if I said it was defective. I've still got some time before I decide.

last night i hooked up my old linksys wap11 to my dsl modem and when the MB is connected to the wap11, no dropouts. So it's specific to certain modems or possibly only wireless G. next thing to try would be to force the dsl modem to only use b and see if it still has a problem. ill try that next.

There's a post on macosxhints which addresses slow airport throughput.

It's not specific to wireless g. a lot of people who had experienced problems with 'n' have gone back to 'g' and have said it's OK.

It spans all intel and G4/G5 macs

It spans all routers including apple ones

It applies to 10.5.0/5.1/5.2 but not for everyone

P.S. Modems don't use 802.11a/b/g/n routers do (and modem routers) access points do etc etc. A DSL modem connects to a router like a Airport extreme which handles DCHP and NAT and gives out DNS addresses to the clients

right. the dsl modem i have has a router built in and wireless. so i plugged the wap11 into the modem, so now have two access points going at the same time. my wifes older computer is connected to the signal coming directly from the dsl modem/wifi router. and I'm now connected to the wap11. no dropouts when connected to the wap11.

If you connect to your modem router lots of drop outs, if you connect to you old router none?

Try downloading a really large file and the simultaneously copy a large file or folder from one machine to the other and anything else you can thing of. if you have bit torrent fire that up too.

High usage of the interface seems to trigger drops but the threshold seems to be different in different setups and randomly on different days.

If you get no drop outs at all with your new setup. run with it, your one of the luck ones.

I'm assuming that the Modem router which is unusable to you now on your mac (which you say your wife's machine is picking up fine) was fine with Tiger?

my wifes computer is an older ibook with an older airport card. it has been working fine in leopard since leopard was released. it has been using the modem router without a problem. but i believe it only does wireless b since it is older.

so this new computer is only a week old, its one of the newest macbooks. it has trouble staying connected to the modem router. From talking to the apple tech, i got the impression that there was some sort of incompatibility with the newer airport cards and some wireless networks, so i decided to plug the wap11 into one of the modems ethernet ports to see if the macbook could stay connected to it.

when i was having problems with the modem router, i wasnt doing anything much at all, just surfing the web, no big files or activity at all.

since this macbook is new, it came pre-installed with leopard so i dont know how it would have been with tiger.

i will stay with the wap11 until apple can figure it out. i still may go ahead and see if shutting off the dsl modem/routers wireless g will make a diff. it would be interesting to test.

I would go ahead and see if you can get both connected to the modem router running 802.11b only. You've got nothing to loose you can always put it back if it doesn't work. If it does work than a least you've got a usable work around for the time being, one that doesn't involve turning airport off and just plugging it in!!!
Good Luck

There is a switcher in my family who just received her new MacBook three days back. Fresh out of the box she has had wifi connection problems. I had her do a fresh install from the restore discs and then go right to the Leopard updates via ethernet connection. Airport still drops. Unfortunately I am 2100 miles away, and the closest Apple Store is 210 miles away, and she is less than pleased. One thing that seems to be different from reading all the complaints is that although her MacBook will connect for a short while after a reboot, the Airport card itself appears to turn off. By that I mean, the pie/radar icon in the menu bar goes empty (not gray, but empty), and when she turns the airport on (via the menu or prefs) it flashes once then goes back to the off looking icon.

does the airport turn off for you people with problems, or do you only experience dropped connections? i.e, no bars versus gray bars, where gray bars means the Airport card is on, but not connected to a network, and no bars means the airport is apparently turned off

Thanks

This is hilarious...

I call Apple, Apple tells me that this is not a known problem and tells me to call my Internet Service Provider. I call AT&T (the ISP) and they tell me to call Apple. This is insane and I can't understand why Apple won't issue an update for it...

However, I do get the Canadian Apple Support Center occasionally and I'm a sucker for techy gals with Canadian accents.

But it still doesn't change the fact that I keep intermittently losing my wifi connection, and it has even happened twice whilst writing this.

Most of the time it's just grayed out but some of the time it does turn itself off. no real pattern as to when it's going to go this and even when it's on it's nearly always lost some random network functionality (iTunes music sharing stops working or something)

I realise it's not an option for your situation but I can recommend going back to Tiger as a good option for keeping your sanity. In the interests of not switching back again though, you might try a complicated Tiger build. You need to find one of the last 10.4.x Intel disks from any machine and install it then run all the updates.

iJobs needs to get a handle one this before they loose too many people back to vista as SP1 is out very soon it actually might start working beyond a superficial level

Another thread I've been contributing in about the same issue. Many people only experienced it after 10.5.2 although I did from the start, until I went back to Tiger (feel like starting a backtotiger.com website but I can't be bothered)

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1389855

Isn't it insulting when they tell you "it's not a known problem I'm sure if you look on the support site there's an easy 2 minute fix for it", makes me want to gnaw my own arm off.

it's not just a leopard issue, i'm running tiger. (4.11) and my wifi (to a Linksys router) is dropping out frequently, there doesnt seem to be a pattern, at first i thought it was just interference with the signal or something, but reading these threads indicated this is not so.

Hopefully apple will be able to offer some good advice soon

I just get gray bars. and it seems to be searching for a signal when this is happening. it only happened with my wireless router/dsl combo modem. it happened in both b/g bands. However, the linksys wap11 is working fine.