Hello! This seems to be a fairly complex connectivity issue but hopefully one of you smarties will end my suffering with a miracle cure! I know my description is a little lengthy, but I thank you sincerely in advance for reading it and for any help you can give me.
So here goes, I recently bought a new macbook pro 15" with Snow Leopard. It works magnificently nearly all the time, except on one of my home networks. The network is comcast cable through a linksys wrt-160N router, with a year-old iMac running Leopard connected via ethernet.
My problem is that on the Macbook, the wireless internet will be working perfectly sometimes and then will suddenly crap out and slow to a crawl. I notice this most often using Netflix, as a show will load very quickly (5-10 seconds each for both "determining video quality" and buffering stages) and then start playing just fine. Then, at some point in the show Netflix comes up with the message that is something like "your internet connection has slowed, we are adjusting playback to avoid further interruption"...and this process is always painfully slow on this network. I usually don't even wait for this to happen, and click reload instead. This sometimes works, and the "determining vid. qual." and buffering will be complete in a few seconds and the show will resume, but more often these will both become very slow as well, taking up to a couple minutes each, which becomes absolutely maddening when it happens repeatedly.
Now I am assuming that because Netflix is streaming, these slow-downs mean that my connection has slowed. I suppose it COULD be a Netflix issue, but I am led to believe otherwise because when the slow-downs occur, my browser and other download speeds seem to slow dramatically as well.
Additionally, I occasionally find my internet totally non-functional even though my wireless network appears in Airport, apparently with full strength. When this happens, I try to reconnect to the network with the WPA2 password, but it says "connection timeout" and will not connect- so frustrating!! To fix this I have to either reset the router (which seems to work sometimes) or reconfigure it with the disc, which does fix the problem for a while.
So there you have it, my connectivity issue in as much detail as I can think to include. I have read some forums which seem to say changing my DNS servers might fix the problem, and I am also wondering whether there is any way the iMac might be disrupting the wireless...somehow? Any brilliant solutions out there? or is there any more insightful information I can gather (speed tests etc.) which might help get to the bottom of this? Any helpful insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks mates!
So here goes, I recently bought a new macbook pro 15" with Snow Leopard. It works magnificently nearly all the time, except on one of my home networks. The network is comcast cable through a linksys wrt-160N router, with a year-old iMac running Leopard connected via ethernet.
My problem is that on the Macbook, the wireless internet will be working perfectly sometimes and then will suddenly crap out and slow to a crawl. I notice this most often using Netflix, as a show will load very quickly (5-10 seconds each for both "determining video quality" and buffering stages) and then start playing just fine. Then, at some point in the show Netflix comes up with the message that is something like "your internet connection has slowed, we are adjusting playback to avoid further interruption"...and this process is always painfully slow on this network. I usually don't even wait for this to happen, and click reload instead. This sometimes works, and the "determining vid. qual." and buffering will be complete in a few seconds and the show will resume, but more often these will both become very slow as well, taking up to a couple minutes each, which becomes absolutely maddening when it happens repeatedly.
Now I am assuming that because Netflix is streaming, these slow-downs mean that my connection has slowed. I suppose it COULD be a Netflix issue, but I am led to believe otherwise because when the slow-downs occur, my browser and other download speeds seem to slow dramatically as well.
Additionally, I occasionally find my internet totally non-functional even though my wireless network appears in Airport, apparently with full strength. When this happens, I try to reconnect to the network with the WPA2 password, but it says "connection timeout" and will not connect- so frustrating!! To fix this I have to either reset the router (which seems to work sometimes) or reconfigure it with the disc, which does fix the problem for a while.
So there you have it, my connectivity issue in as much detail as I can think to include. I have read some forums which seem to say changing my DNS servers might fix the problem, and I am also wondering whether there is any way the iMac might be disrupting the wireless...somehow? Any brilliant solutions out there? or is there any more insightful information I can gather (speed tests etc.) which might help get to the bottom of this? Any helpful insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks mates!
