Help: 24" Alum iMac internet connection wired vs wireless

[mtbdudex]

I moved my 1 year old 24" iMac (new 10/18/07, still under warranty for 3 weeks) from the 2nd floor loft to the newly finished basement craft room. Prior we always used wireless on the iMac, now going to the basement I was concerned with performance so decided to go wired. We have a 2 year old Apple wireless airport (b/g, not n). My home was wired with cat 5e for phone/other, so I put a d-link gigabit 5 port switch in the basement, added the ethernet ends, and ran cat 5e to the craft room and newly finished Home Theatre room (prior to drywall). Now, I have a wired network thru the home, and wireless for our iTouch access.

Strange thing, the iMac is faster at loading web pages via wireless than hard wired, by a lot. I thought there might be something weird with the gigabit 5 port switch, so from work I borrowed a 100' ethernet cable and directly wired it from the airport to the iMac, still same slow loading. It's like the connection is trying to find the requested server (a 3-5 second lag), then once it's found the page(s) do load quite fast.

In the basement, the wireless connection downstairs is sometimes just 2 bars, sometimes drops, not exactly reliable.

Anyway, could there be some issue with the iMac internal ethernet card that is causing this to act up??

Short of me making an Apple Store Genius appointment what else diagnostic/troubleshooting should I do?

I'd really like to make the hard wired connection work, and don't want to get some external antenna for the 2 year old router nor do I want to get a new one yet.

I should say that I'm using the hard wired in other rooms and those computers (a MacBook and a Dell D620 laptop) are very fast hardwired.

 

[squeeks]

COULD be the switch in the airport, is anything else hardwired to the switch? can you borrow another router from someone and try that?

Also, did you turn off the airport card on the imac when you hooked it up to the cable?
not that its a problem but might be something you can try

 

[Eidorian]

I'd like to see you post some ping results first comparing wired and wireless connections.

 

[mtbdudex]

I'd like to see you post some ping results first comparing wired and wireless connections.

Thx for your response, as in my Norton Anti-virus post appears to have been solved (for now).
If re-appears I'll do some "ping" testing, now it's 1:30am, time for sleeeepppp.
Norton Antivirus "Scan entire system" keeps scanning.....

 

[NeoMayhem]

Disable IPv6 in the network preferences.

 

[mtbdudex]

Disable IPv6 in the network preferences.

Q: Total newbie network 101 here:
What does IPv6 do vs IPv4?
Risk of having IPv6 on automatic? (I thought this was my default settings)
What are pro/cons if I turn IPv6 off?

 

[mtbdudex]

Ok;
So I read most of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6 lots of techno stuff.
Nothing mentioned of security risks.

Still not clear to me the risks of using it IPv6, what am I missing???

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is an Internet Layer protocol for packet-switched internetworks. IPv4 is currently the dominant Internet Protocol version, and was the first to receive widespread use. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has designated IPv6 as the successor to version 4 for general use on the Internet.

IPv6 has a much larger address space than IPv4, which provides flexibility in allocating addresses and routing traffic. The extended address length (128 bits) is intended to eliminate the need for network address translation to avoid address exhaustion, and also simplifies aspects of address assignment and renumbering, when changing Internet connectivity providers.

The very large IPv6 address space supports 2128 (about 3.4×1038) addresses, or approximately 5×1028 (roughly 295) addresses for each of the roughly 6.5 billion (6.5×109) people alive today.[1] In a different perspective, this is 252 addresses for every observable star in the known universe[2] – more than ten billion billion billion times as many addresses as IPv4 (232) supported.

While these numbers are impressive, it was not the intent of the designers of the IPv6 address space to assure geographical saturation with usable addresses. Rather, the large number allows a better, systematic, hierarchical allocation of addresses and efficient route aggregation. With IPv4, complex Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) techniques were developed to make the best use of the small address space. Renumbering an existing network for a new connectivity provider with different routing prefixes is a major effort with IPv4, as discussed in RFC 2071 and RFC 2072. With IPv6, however, changing the prefix in a few routers can renumber an entire network ad hoc, because the host identifiers (the least-significant 64 bits of an address) are decoupled from the subnet identifiers and the network provider's routing prefix. The size of each subnet in IPv6 is 264 addresses (64 bits); the square of the size of the entire IPv4 Internet. Thus, actual address space utilization rates will likely be small in IPv6, but network management and routing will be more efficient.