Chris and all,
Wow! Her wifi card must be eighty-sixed, as I've had no such issues with
mine. For those who don't know, I've got a mid 2010 Macbook. it's neither an
Air nor a Pro. It's literally one of the old Mac Books. The only issue with
wireless connectivity has been with my old iPhone Five, but that's not what
this thread is all about.
Ben
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher-Mark Gilland" <clgillan...@gmail.com>
To: <mac-access@mac-access.net>
Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2014 08:08
Subject: [Mac-access]: Major irritation, and Baffling Wifi Trouble
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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