wireless disconnecting when macbook is running on battery

I also have the problem where on battery my wifi connection is up and down all the time. Quite noticable when adium is running, I am disconnected from msn 3/4 times a minute. Anyway hunting around I think the problem has to with power saving and the airport adapter on my macbook pro falling asleep. To counter act this I started to ping my router over wifi in a terminal window and would you believe it, rock solid wifi performance. So if your macbook has perfect wifi when plugged in and intermittent when on battery trying constantly pinging a website/router and see if that help. In the end I created a dashboard widget to do this for me.

ping -i 2 192.168.0.1

If anyone wants the widget let me know, its a bit rough since I have no javascript knowledge, maybe someone can swank it up!
Jas

Terminal, yeah you have to keep it running while on battery.

Like I said, I have a dashboard widget that does it for me.

When I get home I'll upload it somewhere and post a link so it can be run from the dashboard.

Glad it worked, it was doing my head in.

Message was edited by: Jas_Singh

I am not an Apple Genius, but I strongly believe updates 10.4.10 and 10.4.11 did something with the compatibility of the Airport card and the Energy Savings settings.

From my experience, anytime I have the ac adapter plugged in, my Wi-Fi connection is great!

When I am running off of battery power, my connection will drop even though the airport icon shows I am connected at full strength.

What I did was that anytime I am running off the battery, I adjusted the Energy Savings to prevent the computer from going to sleep.

I have been cruising the internet for over an hour now with no drops.

I am not sure if that was the problem, but it seems to be working for me.

I think I found a solution to this today. I have had a macbook pro for 2 years and until I updated to 10.4.10 and 10.4.11 everything worked fine. However after this update I found that when my macbookpro was on battery I would have continual disconnects at random intervals. So here is what I have done. I extracted the IO80211Family.kext extension from the 10.4.11 update using pacifist. I used pacifist to install and replace the items in my system/library/extensions folder. This meant I had the most up to date drivers for the atheros card. I then found that there was two other extensions called appleairport.kext and appleairport2.kext both show up in GET INFO as powerpc extensions, I also noticed that they didn't load when I looked in about this mac /extensions so I deleted both as they are not needed for an intel based mac. Since I have done this I have not had a single disconnect while on battery.
The only other thing that I had done a few day before was to make my macbookpro never to sleep. I think I will try to reintroduce this later on today. Hope this works for others. Good Luck!

Same problem here with a 3 month old MacBook - just got off the phone with Apple Support and the rep had me reset the firmware. Shut down the MacBook, Remove the Battery, Hold Down the Power Button for 5 Seconds, Replace the Battery and restart.

So far, so good - started surfing - sat on a page for about 5 minutes and then clicked to another page and it's working OK - it is a little slow moving to the next page after it sits for a minute or two, but it is moving - not dropping out like before.

Hopefully this'll tide me over until the Leopard update.

David

greetings mate, I think it has to do with your PMU, you need to reset it, shutdown>disconnect the battery>hold down the power button for about 10 seconds, then you reconnect the battery and turn on, you may have to do this again if the first time does not show stability, try it.

ok,
open the terminal window, i think its Applications->Utilities->Terminal
then type in the following without the quotes and hit enter:-
"ping -i 2 www.google.com"
see how you get on

Widget is here
http://www.mediafire.com/?avxmxgeyo3y