Why is the internet on my Macbook so much slower than my PC laptop?

I was wondering this as well. I have a dell desktop and a lenovo t60 laptop (older model for work) and can not figure out why my brand new mac (8 days old) is slower than the older laptop. I have even upgraded a dated router hoping it would help.

I put in, over the weekend, a new Linksys wrt160n. Improved the macbook (from what it was) but then decided to get a usb wireless n card to "speed" up the lenovo (did not want to pull out the internal b/g card as this laptop from work should be cycled out soon). The lenovo with the usb attached now (again) is much (much) faster than the macbook.

Is there an issue with the apple wireless network adapters? i have researched everywhere but can not find anything. Is this just accepted?

And for the record this is my first every mac!

There's something wrong with the configuration of your computer or your router. Online, my Macs are no slower than my PCs. And yes, I can watch streaming video and listen to streaming audio.

In my experience, my macs have always been the exact same speed or faster than my windows box.

i'm assuming that your macbook has leopard on it, if it's recently purchased.

next time you notice the internet is slow, try cycling your airport on/off (go to the airport icon in the menu bar, turn off, wait a few seconds, turn on - or do the same from system prefs.)

for my macbook this will often work. i have noticed that my macbook has difficulty in re-establishing a connection after sleep, so every time i open thie lid, it "sort-of" connects. (ie. it says its connected at full strength, but the speed is horrible.) cycling the airport fixes this issue for me.

never had this issue on a g4 powerbook running tiger, so I dont know if its an intel issue, or a leopard issue.

let me know how it goes!

I'm assuming you are accessing the net via WiFi. Most routers are set to channel 6 by default. Set yours either lower or higher. There are many different flavors of WiFi, designated by 802.1a/b/g/n the higher the letter the faster the speed. It is best to not mix speeds - though obviously if you have a mix of devices you have no choice. Make sure your security is set to WPA or WPA/2. Make sure the router is set to dynamically allocate IP addresses.

On the computer, there isn't much to configure, in fact you really can't without third party software. But one thing you might want to try is to turn WiFi off and then back on to force the compute to get a new signal. You might also want to move around the room a little and make sure you don't have WiFi devices too close to each other. I've found at work that some PC notebooks aren't well shielded and interfere with the computers around them.

If all else fails, call AppleCare. That's why they are there.

On the earlier questions...mac 10.5.3.

Router (the new one) is set to N..as is both laptops, on channel 5. Router is configured correctly (atleast in regards to a PC)...i have done a few searches on the internet and this seems to be a known issue with macbooks. Speed improved when wireless N was setup but it is still slower than the lenovo (which to me is wrong as the macbook is just days old while lenovo is almost 3).

I even tried the on/off airport trick..see no change after doing that.

Hi,

There are a number of discussion threads about slow throughput or repeatedly dropped Wi-Fi connections with MacBooks. There doesn't seem to be a consistent reason or cure.

I had problems with my MaBook with Linksys WRT54GS and an Airport Extreme Base Station. It was something specific to Mac OS - I installed Bootcamp and Windows Vista: I had stable Wi-Fi connections in Vista, but dropped connections in Mac OS. Finally, OSX 10.4.11 fixed the MacBook's poor Wi-Fi connections.

A lot of people are complaining about Wi-Fi problems in Leopard.

If you have an available Windows license, try enabling Bootcamp and installing Windows to see how well Wi-Fi performs in Windows. You can easily disable Bootcamp and reclaim the drive space back to your Mac OS partition if you no longer want Windows.

--Bill

I had the same problem and noticed that I had a manually set s entry. Try removing and see if it makes things better. I added it to help with a VPN connection I have and while i'm not on the VPN i think the timeout was the reason for my delay. hope this helps...