I told my mom it may come down to that, but she won't listen. She seems to
think in her word, I'm gonna turn it on tonight, and it'll just magically
start working correctly. Her exact words, not mine. I told her, yeah, good
freaking luck with that analogy. Ain't probably gonna happen. I told her I
could first back up all her data and get it restored, but she still doesn't
want to wipe the system. It's like, Mom, there is only but so much that all
of us can do. Either take our suggestions, or figure the d*** thing out
yourself.
Chris.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ismael Herrera" <isupr...@me.com>
To: "OS X & iOS Accessibility" <mac-access@mac-access.net>
Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2014 12:54 PM
Subject: Re: [Mac-access]: Major irritation, and Baffling Wifi Trouble
Chris:
I had a similar issue with a MacBook Pro recent model when I upgraded the
software to Yosemite. I went so far as to reset the router, and everything
else you have covered in this email. Finally when I decide to do is have
my student take the computer to the Apple Store to which they reinstalled
everything from scratch and everything seem to be working after that.
Sent from my iPhone
On Dec 31, 2014, at 7:08 AM, Christopher-Mark Gilland
<clgillan...@gmail.com> wrote:
OK, this is absolutely driving my mom and I both crazy! Actually, I'm
writing this message on her behalf in hopes that we can figure this out.
I told her that I fear, she might have a shot wifi adapter, but God only
knows!
So, here's the situation. My mother went about a month ago at the
beginning of December, to the Verizon store, and activated service with
an IPad Air... Not the newer Air, just the older first generation. Nice
unit, by the way. I bought a wifi only model about half a week later, if
that tells you all how jealous I was. LOL! Anyway, one thing about my
mother that you have to understand is, first off, she's not computer
savvy at all. She can do e-mail, and maybe incredibly basic internet
browsing which mainly consists of shopping on Amazon if needed, shopping
on the Keurig web site, then doing her online banking. She can do more
than that if she really puts her mind to it, but it's extremely rare. It
literally took almost 3 years to convince her to get a newer IPad. She
jumped from a wifi only first generation up to what she now has.
One thing about my mom, too is, she never ever runs software updates. I
don't care if it's a major update, or not, she simply refuses. Every
time that an update comes out which addresses some of the issues she's
having, she tells me she's not going to do it, as quote unquote, it'll
screw up her system. A lot of times, I wind up having to do the updates
when she is at work and I'm at home alone, just because otherwise, she'll
find out and throw her usual tantrom about why she doesn't want me doing
anything. I could go on to tell you about how she didn't believe a word
I said when I told her Verizon won't take a 1st gen IPad, it's so old,
never mind the fact that it's not on their network, and is wifi only.
Never mind that she didn't believe me when I told her you can't sync a
backup of I O S 4 to an I O S 8 device. Finally the lady at the Verizon
store had to basically set her straight since my mom wouldn't listen to a
darn thing I said.
Anyway, my point is, God knows what she's done, if anything to cause
this. It's really hard to say. So, she gets her IPad, and she and I go
back and forth, forth and back, about how for her needs, Yosemite would
be a good free update, and would insure that things worked optymally with
her new IPad. It took me almost 4 nights to finally convince her.
Finally, she told me to do it, and run the update. So, I get it updated
for her, and all is working flawlessly. I turned on automatic updates,
so that when one came out, it would notify her. I figured that might
make her feel a bit more confident to update things if she sees it pop up
on her screen, as then she doesn't have to take her stupid little son's
word for things. Pardon my insult to myself. LOL! So, finally, about
half a week ago, she comes practically screaming! her head off at me from
down stairs, "Chris, what the hell did you do to my mac!" I was like,
um... for one, you mind being a bit more polite? Secondly, I didn't do
anything... Why? She starts barking about how it doesn't work. I ran an
update and now it's gonna crash, she knows it, as she's seeing early
signs of it. When I asked her to describe to me the symptoms, she told
me her wifi isn't working. So, I'm going, mehh, this'll be an easy one!
Let me go down and show her how to get the blasted thing back online.
Well, that went over real! well, as I wound up eating crow. Here I am
saying this is an easy fix, well, it's not. I've been trying to figure
this out for quite some time. Basically, her wifi is dropping offline
literally every 10 or so seconds. The icon up in the menu extras keeps
saying no signal. This is very very strange, as the very little it does
connect, it has 4 of 4 bars.
I went online and looked, only to find that for Yosemite, Apple somewhat
recently released an update which fixed wifi issues for some users. I'm
not totally sure what the specifics are of this, or if my mother was one
of the effected people, but I made her aware of this, and told her, this
is why you need to run updates when prompted. She still yelled at me,
telling me I didn't know jack crap, and to leave her quote unquote,
broken mac mini alone. So, I dropped it until last night. Well, last
night, she gets off work, in an absolutely fowel mood, and tells me, "Fix
my mac, and do it now! I can't get online, and I need to do some
business." As if she couldn't do it with her work laptop instead.
Anyway, so once I finally convinced her I'd trouble shoot things further,
but she'd have to trust me, she finally agreed to let me look. The first
thing I did, which she was incredibly hesitant to let me do was to take
the mac upstairs where I could hardwire it to an active ethernet
connection to reliably pull updates. She literally had about 15 of them,
if memory serves me right. It was quite a few... one of them yes, being
that wifi update. Once done, I disconnected the ethernet, and put her
back on wifi. It connected just fine. No issue at all! Then, about 10
seconds later, boom! It went off, and said no signal. I should add that
at this time, the system was no more than maybe 5 feet, if even that,
from the router. I also should add that my Windows laptop, all three of
my macs, my blueray player, my musical keyboard, my IPhone and IPad, my
Apple TV, my Samsung Android tablet, and even my Samsung Galaxy Android
phone all are consistently connecting to the wifi and not dropping even
once regardless. I don't think I've seen them drop even once since I got
this new router last October. At least, not unless I purposely made it
drop while trouble shooting something. I looked in my router at the dhcp
client table, and there is absolutely no IP conflict on the network that
would cause this to be knocking her off. The MTU is fine, 1500, there is
no packet loss at all when I ping her system via terminal, at least not
for the few seconds she'll maintain connectivity. By the way, her
ethernet isn't having this issue. I've ran a verify disk, repair disk,
verify permissions, and fix permissions on her macintosh HD from within
the recovery partition. I reset both her SMC, as well as her PRam. I've
tried setting up another user administrator account to see if maybe
something with her particular user got corrupted, I looked in the router,
and the netmasc is definitely correct: 255.255.255.0. I went to
http://www.ipmonkey.com
and she's got a valid IP from our ISP whilst being online.
I went to:
http://www.testmy.net
and I ran a full system net speedtest, and those results were perfect.
She's getting a 15MB file down at 18Mbps, and up at 4Mbps, which all
things considerred, is really good!
I installed a tracert utility, and the number of hops from her localhost
to
http://www.timewarnercable.com
were phenominal. They were perfectly within acceptable range.
I called Time Warner, and had them look at the modem itself. Our RF DB
noise ratio on the coax line is perfect, not that that really matters in
this case, per sé, being we're dealing with wifi, not direct connection,
but I didn't want to not rule it out. At this point, I was unwilling to
discount anything. Within the network preferences, under the wifi
service, I went to advanced. In here, I looked at the dns. It's
correctly on automatic, and the primary router IP is correct, the primary
dns IP is showing the router's IP, and the secondary is showing Time
Warner, which is 100% correct, as it should be. Her TCP/IP settings all
look correct. I released, and renewed her IP, which did no good. I
power cycled the router, and the modem. NO good. It's still dropping.
It's better, yes, but still by no means acceptable. It's now dropping
about once every 5 minutes. I went under system prefs and looked at her
energy settings. Nothing is set to knock her network ability offline
after being idle for X amount of time. I looked under the wins tab within
advanced of the network preferences on the wifi service. I made sure
that she was connected to the same workgroup as the rest of our LAN. She
wasn't, so I promptly fixed that issue, then rebooted. That didn't help.
I looked to see if she had turned on the firewall under system prefs
security. She hadn't. I looked at the firewall internally within the
router, and nothing was blocking her system at all. So, yeah, I'm totally
perplexed beyond belief! I honestly am totally at my wit's end. I told
her she may have to go take the thing into the Apple store, and make a
Genious appointment. The only other thing I can think is that her wifi
adapter itself is shotty. I dono how that could of happened so randomly,
but, I guess it's hardware. Anything's possible. Again, it's the whole,
is it possible? Yes. Is it probabal? NO. But short of beating the
thing with a jackhammer, I don't know what else to do!
Obviously, I'm kidding about the jackhammer remark. I'm not that dumb!
LOL! When I made mention about this to her, and told her she may have to
pay though, as she never got the Ajpple Care plan, she started her usual
yelling again at me, saying how it's my fault for not telling her to get
it back in the days, which of corse, newsflash! I did! teller! She just
didn't wanna do it, because she thought it wasn't necessary. I told her
back in the days, OK, then don't come crying to me if something breaks.
She's like, nothing'll break. W'w'wail? Hmm! Gee? Gee, Gee! Really?
Ya, think? How's that wifi card workin for her? LOL!
I think I finally convinced her to take it in, but, God knows. By the
way, I did try connecting her to another wifi network at a neighbor's
house, and even there, she had this issue as well, so we definitely can
rule out that it's not! our router that's the issue. Have I maybe missed
something in all my frustration? Or are you all leaning to the same
conclusion I am... busted wifi card.
Chris.
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However, this should in no way replace your own security strategy. We assume
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