Macbook Pro wifi stops working, won't turn back on, requires restart to fix?

Question

Level 1

7 points

Macbook Pro wifi stops working, won't turn back on, requires restart to fix?

So for the last two days my Macbook Pro's being doing something very strange. At random times, the wifi will just stop working (as in it thinks I have wifi but no webpages load anymore and my dropbox can't sync) and when I go to turn the wifi off and back on (in an effort to restart the chip thinking it would solve the issue), it won't turn back on. I go into the System Preferences, hit "turn wifi on" and nothing happens. I hit it about 10 times and that does absolutely nothing. I've then tried putting my mac to sleep and waking it back up, which delivers even stranger results; The wifi turns back on, but can't find any networks, both using scan and manually inputting the details of my network. So far the only fix for it is to just restart my Mac and then the wifi works just fine like nothing ever happened (until it happens again, usually a few hours later). I'm currently running OS X Mavericks 10.9.4 on a 15" early 2011 Macbook Pro (MC723LL/A) with 2.2 GHz quad-core i7 and a 1TB Samsung 840 EVO SSD. The most recent modifications I've made are just installing GDB debugger and creating a custom certificate for it to be able to run Eclipse C/C++ IDE on my Mac, but I seriously doubt that would have caused the issue (especially since that was running for a few days before this happened). Has anyone else had a problem like this?

MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.4), Early 2011, 15"

Posted on Sep 13, 2014 10:45 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

Narimaan Author

Level 1

7 points

Sep 13, 2014 11:18 AM in response to Narimaan

Well literally in between writing that first post and now, the wifi acted up again, except this time after rebooting, it said there was no airport wireless card. I reset the PRAM and NVRAM twice (because after the first time it thought it still had a wireless card, but still refused to turn the card on) and now it's working again, but now I'm wondering, is my Airport wifi card dying?

Reply

Answer 2

Myra J

Level 1

24 points

Sep 13, 2014 11:46 AM in response to Narimaan

So many people are having this problem. I believe I have solved it. I posted it on another thread, but I will post it here:

First - let me say that I tried trashing the bluetooth preferences and restarting. That worked for about 10 minutes, then I also tried reorder the connections in Network Preferences, that didn't do much either.

Here's what worked: Open System Preference, click on "Energy Saver", uncheck "Wake for network access". This has totally worked for me. I connect flawlessly and immediately to my network and to my printer.

My order of connectivity of network devices is still ordered where Bluetooth is near the last of the devices. But really, try deselecting "Wake for network access"

Reply

Answer 3

Narimaan Author

Level 1

7 points

Sep 13, 2014 11:50 AM in response to Myra J

Thanks for that, I unchecked that like you said, hopefully it lasts. I'll wait a few days to see if it doesn't act up again, if it doesn't you certainly have found the answer to my problem then 😀

Reply

Answer 4

Narimaan Author

Level 1

7 points

Sep 14, 2014 12:32 PM in response to Myra J

Nope, sorry, didn't work, my Mac was fine the rest of yesterday, but again today my wifi died, restarting "fixed" it for now, but turning off "Wake for network access" didn't seem to solve the problem for me. I'm starting to be skeptical of the idea that my wifi card is dying since it went from not working for an hour and not even being detected for a little bit yesterday, to then working fine the rest of the day yesterday and morning today. Thing is, if it's not hardware, it's software, but I don't know much about the bowels of the Mac OS X operating system, so what can I do? 😕

Reply

Answer 5

Myra J

Level 1

24 points

Sep 20, 2014 10:05 AM in response to Narimaan

Sorry that your wifi is still giving you problems.

This page http://howtoapple.com/mavericks-wifi-issues-fix/ has a bunch of fixes. The ones I did were "Set service order" and "Disable Wake for Network Access" Maybe both of those would work.

Reply

Answer 6

Narimaan Author

Level 1

7 points

Sep 20, 2014 10:35 AM in response to Myra J

Thanks for those suggestions, I've pretty much eliminated the software possibility of the issue when I swapped out my SSD for my old HDD that I put Ubuntu on to test on my Mac with and it had the same issue even then. I posted another issue (Macbook Pro screen has vertical and horizontal lines on part of it) after posting this one when my Mac started having issues with the screen also, so I went to the Apple store to have that checked out and they told me I need a new screen so I'm going to use their flat-rate repair service to get my screen, wifi card, and trackpad (hasn't clicked so well the last few months) for about $330 which I don't mind too much because I imagined it would be much worse. But thanks again for those suggestions, I'll definitely keep them on hand in case I have another similar issue. ➕

Reply

Answer 7

daighi

Level 1

0 points

Sep 4, 2015 4:07 PM in response to Narimaan

Out of interest, did replacing the wifi card solve the problem for you? I'm having the exact same problem on my 2012 Macbook Pro 13" (Yosemite 10.10.5). I also think that it is a hardware problem because I have similar wifi issues when I dual boot in OSX and linux (openSUSE)...

Reply