iMac airport problems

[bigbadnewill]

I am having some problems with my wireless on my new 24" alu imac. I have recently installed Linux (ubuntu) on my laptop and was having difficulties with the wireless on that so i reset my wireless router to default, ie no wep password etc. This allowed me to easier connect to it, whilst I was in the setup stage.

I then got the wireless working on Ubuntu and decided to make my whole system a little more safe, so wanted my WEP encryption. When i came to change my router settings back to what i want I have had real problems reconnecting with the mac. It often doesn't connect when i boot it up, everytime it goes into a power-safe (sleep) type mode the wireless disconnects. It has always done this, but was never a problem as i had to click on airport and it would reconnect. Now however, I have to reboot the mac in order for it to connect again.

It's really annoying me how a £1500 machine is struggling with a wep password, and my crappy laptop with an open source operating system is connecting fine!

Also, my wife says iPhoto has been crashing a lot recently, as had iTunes for myself!! I must say, in the first few months of having the mac it isn't as enjoyable as i thought. (and i'm not particularly a complainer either!! ha)

All my software is up to date so there is nothing i can do there!

Any ideas people??

 

[mkrishnan]

Okay, okay, okay... please slow down. You've thrown out a lot of information here, but you've left out most of the useful details...

- What kind of router?
- 802.11g or 802.11n, 2.4GHz or 5GHz?
- Do you have to use WEP or can you use a real standard like WPA?
- Is the network MAC filtered?
- What all did you do with the Mac in the time before iTunes and iPhoto started crashing?
- Has anything changed physically in or near your home that could be causin a change in wireless interference? Have you tried other channels?

This is kind of all over the place. If you really, honestly didn't do anything with the Mac (use DeLocalizer or MonoLingual, or install any apps that modify basic system behavior), this is sounding like you may have some kind of hardware issue or possibly a corrupt install of OS X. Those kinds of errors are not typical.

Just as a guideline, what you should expect...

- In the absence of interference, connecting and maintaining to WEP should not be an issue (as odious as WEP is). Assuming the network is on the preferred networks list and the password is saved on the iMac, the iMac should disconnect from wireless automatically when it sleeps (because it turns its wifi card off), but it should automatically reconnect without any intervention on wake (it may take a couple of seconds, but should be less than 5 seconds from getting back to the desktop, in almost any situation).

- iTunes is pretty rock solid. I can't remember the last time I crashed it.

- iPhoto crashes a bit more often, but this is also generally pretty rare. More than once every week or two under heavy use would be odd to me.

 

[bigbadnewill]

Yeah, sorry my last post was vague...and perhaps it should have been split into 2, but thanks for the reply.

Ok, in the last few months I have connected to the mac with no encryption, WEP and WPA. Previously all worked fine. The reason I have gone back to WEP is that in Ubuntu it is a bit harder to set the wireless up to accept WPA, but it is something I am looking into as I much prefer having WPA encryption.

I know you may now say...get rid of Ubuntu and then go back to WPA on the mac, but that isn't happening. I need to learn Ubuntu as part of my uni course, so it has to stay

Nothing as far as i know has changed around my house which may affect my wireless. As mentioned, my laptop and old PC both connect to wireless fine!

As for the channel, my router is using channel6 as default. Do I need to change anything in airport settings if i change the channel on my router? I'm fairly new to wireless networking, and have never really had problems with it, so have done very little research,

My router is a D-Link DI-624+, 2.4GHz. Ever since I have had the mac it has never recovered it's connection from sleep unless I connect it myself. I have to click the airport icon in the top tray and then click on my wireless network.

As for iTunes, it was crashing a lot when I was burning CD's into iTunes and i was also sorting out tracks, album-art etc. I know it was busy importing, but at the same time, this is a premium machine and in the past I could do anything with iTunes whilst it imported CD's.

As for iPhoto, it only crashes on my wifes profile. It won't even load anymore, I'll look into that more as she has just told me a little more about it.

Sorry again about my random blurt of information, I hope this is a little more informative.

 

[heathcliff]

very slow WiFi on iMac

I also have a new 24" iMac. Couple months old (Tiger) and only connected via WLAN. I also use a Dell Laptop for work and side by side the Dell will transfer the same file from the same website (like the Mac version of GIMP) at 4X the download speed.

I'm pretty network savvy, having run my own network and a network with 10 PC's on a small business server, so I'm fairly confident it is not my router (DLINK DI-524). I have tested with no security and with the router running only 802.11g with short preamble, still slow speeds.

Used both Firefox and Safari, same results.

The Airport card has firmware 4.170.13.1
OS/X 10.4.11

I would really appreciate any help you can offer.

thanks