New, beautiful laptop, extremely slow wifi networking

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Onion

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Just purchased a dual core 15 inch laptop running os x 10.4.8. The machine isn't working very well out of the box. The wifi networking, internet access is extremely slow. The PCs, connected by wifi, in the same room work as expected. My wife's 7 year old iBook, running os x 10.2.x, has faster internet access. My wife is asking why I spent all this money to buy her a new laptop.

The new laptop seems to reach the peak speed for short spurts. However, there are hiccups where nothing happens. Latency on initial connections in the browser seems to be particularly bad.

Some facts:

1. Major packet loss even pinging 10.0.0.1. Anywhere from 10-60%. The old mac laptop has no packet losses.

2. I installed broadband tuner ... is there a way to change settings on this or does installing it update the settings?

3. My base station is 802.11b (dlink).

4. I tried playing with MTU, but didn't make anything better.

5. I haven't had a chance to try it on a different wifi network to see if the base station has anything to do with the problem.


Any help would be appreciated. From doing a web search, it appears that this is a somewhat common problem. However, I haven't seen any definitive responses.

Thanks.
 
Have you activated Interference Robustness? Is the firewall on?

Your base station is broadcasting on the slower b signal (g being the higher one) but that doesn't explain why the Pc's are faster. Could be an op system/software thing.

This poster here (scroll to bottom of page) talks about Spotlight causing slowdowns because on restart it indexes your entire hard drive--a very processor intense procedure:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/13052
 
Thanks for the reply.

I had Interfernce Robustness on and turned it off, figuring it might be slowing things down. Not sure about firewall settings.

Regarding Spotlight ... the machine has been on for a few days now so the hard drive should already be indexed.
 
I'd check the Activity Monitor just to be absolutely sure you don't have anything running in the background...

Also, have you repaired permissions yet? apps/utilities/disk utility/repair permissions. It's the basic 'catch all' fix, but might help here.

Go to system preferences/sharing to activate your firewall.
 
Curious as to why you think its the result of a busy processor. I would guess that the packet loss is primarily due to a basic networking problem.

What are you thinking about the firewall? I wouldn't expect it to affect the performance of networking on this machine within my home network.

I did run repair permissions last night.

I'm not near the computer now. Will investigate these things tonight when I'm home.
 
There might be something wrong with the installation. I usually reinstall new hardware - if only to deselect the languages I'll never need, anyway. Might try that before going into all the nasty MTU stuff. If the other computers including Macs are working okay on the WiFi network, then there seems to be nothing wrong with the network, so I wouldn't focus on _that_ too much.
 
Checked the activity monitor ... cpu is idle.

Tried the suggestions. Nothing changed. I hope there is nothing wrong with the installation as its a brand new computer.

Running the speakeasy speed test, it starts downloading quite fast and then stops for a while and then continues at a slower speed. This is the behavior I've seen when downloading stuff via http and ftp. Other times, there seems to be a hiccup when doing the dns lookup and first connecting to a web site.
 
But if it's a brand new computer, reinstallation should be not a real drag! That's exactly why I'd consider it. You don't have "organically grown" folder structures on it you don't know how to backup exactly: You have an almost clean system. Easy to reinstall. Done in less than an hour. Might be worth it.
 
Do you have a Location created for your laptop to connect to your network or are you using 'Automatic'? I find when I create specific locations then my speed goes up because the mac isn't constantly searching for the correct network to use.

If you're on wireless, turn off Ethernet for that Location, and vice-a-versa for a wired Location; turn off wireless. View the options in apple menu/Locations.
 
Onion, I'm having the exact same problem with my new core 2 duo Macbook 13 inch. On the Apple official discussion forums I've seen a lot of people with the same problem.

I've actually managed to install Boot Camp and Windows XP, and to my surprise the wireless networking is flawless on the same machine!!

Now how sad is that? I just got a brand new Mac, but I'm stuck to WINDOWS because on OSX the Wi-Fi just blows...

My guess: crappy driver.
 
I'm in business now. Short story: It appears to be a combination of problems, the wireless networking in the laptop wasn't performing as well as it should and my base station didn't work very well with the Apple laptop. I now have a new laptop and a new access point.

The long story: I took the machine into the local apple store where I bought it. The "genius" ran a few comparison tests and my wireless didn't perform as well as the machines in the store. To do the comparison, he was able to isolate the machines on a private wireless network. Since I bought the machine at that store, I was able to swap my old machine for a new machine. The new machine seems to work better; its able to hold the connection much better. Although, even with the better connection, it was still hitting spots where the connection slowed to a crawl. I saw this behavior using the speed tests on the Internet (speakeasy/dslreports).

Once I had the new machine and better connectivity, I swapped access points. I replaced a Dlink 'b' access point with a Linksys 'g' access point. Now my connection isn't dropped and the speed seems to be sustained. Both the mac's and the pc's in the house are happy.

I haven't done a test to see that I'm getting 'g' speeds when copying between machines on my home network. However, the Internet connection is now working as well as I can expect with my 'slow' DSL connection.
 
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