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imac man

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 19, 2009
7
0
My daughter is running 10.6.2 on her Macbook. Yesterday she was connected to a web site. She left her computer and came back later to view the site again. When it attempted to load a video on the site she lost her internet connection (via a router and dsl modem that I also use with my iMac). She has been unable to reestablish her connection to my wireless network. (My iMac connection is working fine.) We have tried retyping the router password in the keychain and in Network preferences. No luck. This happened once before and she ended up having to restore her hard drive from TimeMachine. What's going on?
 
This is a long-standing issue with SL 10.6.2. You might scan this thread, though it's 50-some pages. What I think you'll find is that this is a very strange issue. People find solutions that do nothing for other people. I've had the problem since about 10.6.2 was released and I'm anxiously awaiting 10.6.3. Hopefully it will resolve the problems.

Here's how I fix it, and it's not much of a fix: I have an external hard drive that has a partition that still has Leopard. When SL has a problem, I run Leopard for several days and usually I can come back to SL with no issues. It has to be for several days, sometimes at least a week. I'm not sure why that works. But after about a week of Leopard, I can go about a month on Snow Leopard with no connectivity issues.

Last time, I tried running the nightly/weekly/monthly Leopard maintenance scripts, thinking a change might have affected wireless. That didn't seem to do it. So I'm at a loss to explain why Leopard resets whatever's wrong.

mt
 
Here's how I fix it, and it's not much of a fix: I have an external hard drive that has a partition that still has Leopard. When SL has a problem, I run Leopard for several days and usually I can come back to SL with no issues. It has to be for several days, sometimes at least a week. I'm not sure why that works. But after about a week of Leopard, I can go about a month on Snow Leopard with no connectivity issues.

Wow, that is wild. Does it seem to affect only MBPs, or is it seen on all Mac models?
 
now she's up

OK that's wierd. In response to Eric's question, we went back into Network Preferences to check the status. It said she was "connected." So she launched Safari and, bingo, she's back online. Go figure. Thanks for your responses.

By the way, she is using a Macbook, not a Pro. I have a Belkin router.

Also, I have had some similar less troublesome issues w/my iMac and 10.6.2. Occasionally, when I launch Safari I get a notice that I'm not connected to the internet. (My home page URL is in the address bar.) If I hit the return key it then will immediately connect to the site. And recently I couldn't connect at all, and had to restore my router password to either my keychain or network preferences (I don't remember which). I have begun to suspect that there is a bug with SL .2.
 
It seems staying connected to certain types of wireless routers is a problem with Snow Leopard itself. Both my Rev. C Macbook Air and late 2008 Unibody Macbook Pro would connect and stay connected to my work router without any problems, never having any trouble connecting to the internet. Once Snow Leopard was installed on each, neither will stay connected to the internet on the same router for longer than a half hour. I've tried Leopard to Snow Leopard upgrades, as well as fresh installs of SL. Nothing remedies the problem. However, as soon as I downgrade back to Leopard on either machine, the connection issues stop. And the connection issue is specifically in regards to internet connectivity, as when I lose the ability to connect to the internet on Snow Leopard (when the problem occurs), I still have the ability to connect to any other computer on the network. This same problem occurs on the wireless router at my mom's house, as well as one of my friends houses, but not on my home router or my Verizon MiFi router. I've tried every fix listed on the forums here regarding "Snow Leopard wireless problems", but none work. The only short term fix I've found is to turn off the Airport adapter in each laptop, wait about 30 seconds, the turn it on again and reconnect to the network. But quite often this only lasts a few minutes before the problem reoccurs. It's even present on a brand new machine, as I just purchased one of the $799 Microcenter deal Unibody White Macbooks last night as a kick-around machine, and it shows the same problem under Snow Leopard. There's obviously something that has changed in the way Mac OSX interacts with routers from Snow Leopard to Leopard.

Edit: I should add that this problem has been with each of my machines (Macbook Air and Macbook Pro) on each version of Snow Leopard, 10.6.2 included. The new Unibody white Macbook is on 10.6.2 and having it as well.
 
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