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Poor Airport Signal on MacPro
- Thread starter joshwest
- Start date
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Where is your router located?
I figured out there usually is some sort of interference that messes with the reception.
I get 3-4 bars when upstairs in my room, the router is about 2 floors below.
I figured out there usually is some sort of interference that messes with the reception.
I get 3-4 bars when upstairs in my room, the router is about 2 floors below.
its 6 - 9 feet away from my Mac Pro, But it is in a closet. The Cabling for this room is really weird, if i was to run cat 6 it would be ran across the floor and i dont want that.
It shouldnt be that bad. My router is 1500 feet away with walls in between and I still get 1-2 bars.
I have airport strangeness but have managed to work around it.
The 10.4.6 that came with my macpro gives me crappy signal.
upgrading to 10.4.9 actually made it rock solid, full 5 bars. Apple must have improved the drivers somewhere along the line.
Now, when I boot to XP with bootcamp, I get crappy speeds again...even my DSL downloads at half rate. So, I do my windows downloading through Parallels accessing my bootcamp partition and get full speed! Very Strange.
Tips I found very useful
1) Change your default channel. If you have lots of neighbours with wifi, and they're on the same channel, it causes interferance. Changing your channel to at least 4 numbers away from the default should make a crazy difference (did for me).
Try a few channels and see what works best for you.
2) Angle of antenna. If you can change the angle of your wifi antenna, do so, this also gave me crazy improvements on latency.
3) Firmware. Make sure your router is on the latest firmware
4) Security settings. Try as a test with no encryption, see if you get a better signal. If you do, slowly improve your protection from wep to wpa on low to high settings, see if you can find a balence between security and performance.
5) Extreme measures. If the worst comes to the worst, buy an onmidirectional wifi antenna. I caution against this, as it really boosts your range for outside hackers getting in (/paranoid), plus it could also give you cancer
rolleyes: so some belive) 6) Your closet. Walls can really affect a wifi signal, try opening the door, see if you get a better signal. Try taking it out of the closet, see if it improves. With wifi, it's not just thickness, it's the density of the walls that can have an effect on your signal.
Try 'em out, see how you go!
The Channel would be on your router. I have a netgear, and that's just under the wifi settings.
I have the same problem. It's drops every hour or so. The router is in the front of my townhouse, and I am in the back. About 20 feet apart. However there are 2 rooms and a hall in that area.
I have no problem with my dell and its built in wireless getting a solid signal.
possible fix: check "enable network robustness" on router
I was having a lot of problems on my macpro tower with a new card.
The connection would drop out and need to be reconnected (often manually) every minute or so. It would also sometimes throw up dumb errors on reconnecting - Incompatible Network security" etc..
I thought the installation must be faulty but found one guy on this forum who said "enabling network robustness" on the base station (under the manual config settings via the airport admin utility) had helped.
I have done this and it seems to have helped a lot. The signal still seems no where near as consistent as my macbook air which sits happily on the same desk with full bars. But at least right now it is not loosing the connection altogether.
Anyone know why the tower would get worse reception than the laptop? is it possible they connected up the aerials wrong?
I was having a lot of problems on my macpro tower with a new card.
The connection would drop out and need to be reconnected (often manually) every minute or so. It would also sometimes throw up dumb errors on reconnecting - Incompatible Network security" etc..
I thought the installation must be faulty but found one guy on this forum who said "enabling network robustness" on the base station (under the manual config settings via the airport admin utility) had helped.
I have done this and it seems to have helped a lot. The signal still seems no where near as consistent as my macbook air which sits happily on the same desk with full bars. But at least right now it is not loosing the connection altogether.
Anyone know why the tower would get worse reception than the laptop? is it possible they connected up the aerials wrong?