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Smileyboy

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Aug 6, 2008
1,149
132
I need some help with my Imac. It seems to keep dropping the wireless connection. My iphone, iPad and MBA are fine... Any suggestions?
 
I had the same problem on mine, switching the router to channel 9 worked for me. There's been several people with solutions for this but this is the one that worked for me.
 
My 2011 iMac also seems to have some problems with my wireless router. But its significantly worse with Lion, where I have to restart the computer several times to establish the connection..

P.S. What worked for me: making a static DHCP entry for the iMac in the router. Now the connection is more stable.
 
Any tips as to how to do any of this? I'm using a Apple Airpot extreme router.

Thanks again!!
 
Seems to be a common problem - there's several threads on the Apple Support Forums for it.

I've just purchased a 21.5in base model this weekend, and it started exhibiting this behaviour yesterday. Really annoyed about it. Hoping it gets patched shortly.

EDIT - Quick question - anyone with Lion betas/GM able to confirm whether the issue remains? Just curious...
 
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It could be caused by several things, one is the channel being used. Download iStumbler and see what channel your neighbors are on, most people never bother to change the default which is either 5 or 6. You can change it to any other available channel. I did this and that helped.

I also had a similar issue and found it was the DNS settings my ISP was using were causing the problem. Changed the DNS and that fixed it. BTW MacWorld wrote an article about troubleshooting DNS settings, you can read it if you want at http://www.macworld.com/article/146064/2010/02/troubleshootdns.html?t=234

Follow:


1. System preferences
2. Network
3. Click Advanced
4. Click DNS tab
5. Click + sign
6. Add 208.67.222.222
7. Click + sign
8. Add 208.67.220.220
9. Click OK.
10. Exit System Preferences
11. Try out your iMac and report what happened.
 
Don't have the links handy, but the support forum threads show that none of the above is working in most cases. Some people are having limited success changing channels, but problem returning after a short while.

The key factor appears to be that booting into Windows on the same machine removes the issue - it's only happening in OS X, on iMacs (all other wireless devices working fine). Ergo, it must be something related to OS X software or OS X drivers.

It seems Apple are aware of the issue - just hoping for a fix soon, as I'm going to have a tough time explaining to my partner why the machine we just dropped £1000 can't hold a connection when the iBook G4 she's upgrading from could hold it fine.
 
I need some help with my Imac. It seems to keep dropping the wireless connection. My iphone, iPad and MBA are fine... Any suggestions?

Do yourself a big favor and and change your DNS in Network to Google's. Delete what is in there, then use the plus button and change the first one to 8.8.8.8, then click the plus button again and add 8.8.4.4, which should fix it.

I had a steady connection problem and did all the things that everybody has said, but it wasn't until I changed my DNS to the two numbers provided, and it was an immediate fix, no problems since then which was almost a year ago.

Good luck.....
 
I have a mid-2011 27 iMac and my Airport connection drops as well. I've noticed that it drops whenever my iMac awakens from sleep. I also have an Airport Extreme base station.

It has reached a point where I don't put the iMac to sleep because I find restarting the iMac annoying so to restart the internet connection.
 
When my imac goes to sleep, it does lose wireless connection with my airport extreme too, but connects after it wakes. It may take a few seconds but does connect. Only one time did it drop and did not reconnect, and that was while using yahoo messenger camera and also trying to get it to work with the icam app on iphone. It not only dropped wifi connection but both iphone and imac no longer recognized the airport extreme. I had to reboot the router.
 
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