Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

MonksMac

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 5, 2005
622
4
DFW
I'm literally at my wits end right now...

I have a 1.83ghz Core Duo Mac Mini that's been perfectly happy running Snow Leopard for the past two years.

I've recently moved into a new apartment and decided to change the name of my wireless network (I'm using an Airport Extreme Base Station as the access point), but after doing so the Mac Mini can't seem to maintain a proper connection to the wireless network.
Web pages either wouldn't load or would load very, very slowly, and Spotify wouldn't connect correctly.

Thinking that the Mini would benefit from a nice fresh install, I reinstalled OS X Leopard (what I had handy at the time, thanks to a misplaced SL disk) and was able to sort of connect to the wireless network, but it again was very slow and would eventually refuse to load any pages or download updates.

I finally found my SL disk and just finished installing it a little while ago and it's actually behaving worse than Leopard was. Again, pages don't load properly, updates "can't be saved", etc.
I was able to verify that the Mac Mini can connect just fine to the internet through it's Ethernet port, and the WiFi works just fine when I booted into the machine's secondary partition running Windows XP.
Is the Airport Card going bad? I mean, I know it's an 8 year old machine at this point, but my 12" PowerBook G4 running Tiger connects to the same network just fine and it's 10 years old... :confused:
 
Have you tried another WiFi router/AP?

Also try at a different location if you can. I'm kind of in the same boat with my Late 2013 rMBP and a Cisco/Linksys router. WiFi doesn't usually connect on OS X (Yosemite, but happens in Mavericks, too), but connects fine on Bootcamp'd Windows 8.

All I can think of is interference from other networks (the airwaves are actually quite saturated where I am), which is possible given you're in a new place. That's why I suggest setting up the AirPort somewhere else, like at a friend's house.

It's possible that OS X has a lower tolerance for interference or something like that... I'm not sure. But if the AirPort card works fine in Windows, it's probably not a hardware issue.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.