iMac Dropping connection, others connect fine

[matttrick]

Hey all. The past two days, my iMac has been dropping its connection to the network randomly. I am connected on my macbook pro right now, my cell phone and game systems connect fine. It's Just the iMac. I havent changed anything about the network at all. I updated to the latest OS X version a few days ago, but other than that nothing else has changed. Is this sounding like a hardware failure on the iMac wireless device?

Some more info. I connect with WPA2. My router says that the imac is connected because it has the mac address under attached devices. The imac shows full bars on the airport icon, but when i go to network settings it says Airport is turned on but not connected to network

 

[Koodauw]

Good question. We have a similar problem at our place but the opposite. Our iMacs connect just fine, the MBP can't find the network sometimes. Rather annoying. We are using WPA2 as well, with 2 Airport Express. How about you?

 

[matttrick]

im using a netgear router that until two days ago allowed connection perfectly. really frustrating and makes no sense. the fact that the mbp and other devices connect fine make me suspect the wireless hardware on the imac. its under warranty, but its a 20 min drive just to have someone look at it and im sure they will place the blame elsewhere. im going to bring it to my parents' tomorrow and see if it connects there. quite a pain.

anyone know if there have been any issues with imacs and the latest OS X update?

 

[dolphin842]

The frustrating thing about wireless is that there are any number of factors that could be to blame. I had a wireless problem with my iMac, wherein it occasionally wouldn't auto-connect when waking from sleep. Once I flashed my wireless router's firmware with something more reliable, the problems for the most part went away. Another time, I was getting inconsistent download speeds over wireless; the download would just cut to 0 kbps once every few seconds. Turns out it was a wireless network auditing program (iStumbler) that I had running... it was spamming the console logs with an insane amount of data, seizing the hard drive up to the point where it couldn't devote any time to writing the download to disk. All this goes to say that wireless troubleshooting is notoriously tricky (and that I feel your pain ).

On a related note, in regards to taking the iMac in for service, have you called AppleCare about this problem? They can do a proximity search to find your nearest authorized repair shop. I only say this because when I called, they found a place nearby that I didn't know existed! It certainly saved some time and money, so it's worth getting in touch with them if you haven't already.