My MB Pro Wireless Internet connection keeps disconnecting

[Iconic Drei]

I got a MacBook Pro for christmas. Everything was working fine and I could not of been happier. Untill a few days ago when the wireless internet for my home connection only keeps dropping out. It lasts for around 2-3 minutes and then will drop out for around the same time. Sometimes it will last for the whole duration of my internet use but then the next time I use it the problem will return. I have used the wireless internet at college and one of my family members house with no problems at all. I researched on Google and have found that many people have a similar problem. I have tried resetting the PRAM, disabled the IPV6, accessed my router and changed the channel, deleted the network and set up a new one, and removed the network on my mac and connected to it again, all to no avail. In the house their are two desktops and two laptops (including my Macbook). The only one which is an Apple is of course my MacBook Pro.

The Router is a NetGear WGR614 v6
Connection: WPA-PSK (Cannot change to WPA2 or any other apart from WEP)
The other Laptop in the House is used right next to my MacBook and it works fine
I've moved my Mac right next to the router and there's still no difference.

Your help will be much appreciated, Thanks

 

[simbalala]

I was having a lot of trouble and I searched for all the fixes that it seems you have found.

In my case the thing that seems to have made a difference was maintenance.

If my machine misses the periodic maintenance scripts (which it often does) WiFi starts to act up.

You can run the maintenance scripts via Terminal or you can use a utility like Main Menu. Find the free version at http://creativebe.com/frequently-asked-questions.html#Where_can_I_download_older_v101 (The version linked there is actually 1.74).

Onyx is another app which you can use to run the scripts.

I also run the cache cleaning utilities fairly often.

Since I started doing this my WiFi problems have been cleared up. It's not an obvious solution and I only tried it after trying everything else because it never occurred to me that it would make a difference.

The thing I noticed was that when using iStumbler the signal strength and noise would not vary but I'd start losing bars in the AirPort menu icon. When it got down to one my connection would become very flaky. The only thing I can figure is that the machine becomes too busy with encryption and the logging and it starts to mess up on the WiFi connection.

You can find iStumbler here: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11753/istumbler

You can use it to check signal strength and noise.

Let me know if this helps you, I'm curious.

 

[djackmac]

Since you've already been through deleting your wireless network and recreating it, I would do a hard reset on the router and reconfigure it again. Every router has a different hard reset procedure so do a google search on how to do a hard reset for that model of router. I'll bet netgear has the procedure posted somewhere on their site. Also, after doing this in the router web interface there should be an option to search and upgrade the firmware version on the router.

 

[simbalala]

Since you've already been through deleting your wireless network and recreating it, I would do a hard reset on the router and reconfigure it again.

Good advice. I had done all that and updated to the latest version of firmware for the router. I still had trouble.