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Macbook Wireless Problem

Posted on April 13, 2008 by Kevin Doyle | 4 Comments

Macbook I have mentioned numerous times here how much I love my Macbook, so much so that I recently upgraded the hard drive, RAM and OS instead of purchasing a new machine.

I have also posted before regarding the issues I have had with my macbook. This includes two split cases and a bad battery. All of this I could deal with, and have dealt with, without too much of a hassle. I have always been able to use my Macbook regardless of these inconveniences. That is until my latest problem.

It started completely out of nowhere. No recent software updates, no recent hardware updates, nothing I can pinpoint as being an issue. All of a sudden my wireless signal is all over the place and dropping the signal completely. The first thing I do is power cycle my router and change the router channel. This did nothing, so I checked the wireless signal on my other laptop and iphone and both are showing strong. I used to be able to pick up at least ten wi-fi signals from my house but now I only see two.

A little searching on the Apple forums reveal I am not the only one with this problem. It appears to be a fairly common and known issue (although not acknowledged by Apple at this point). This thread has over 100 replies and over 8000 views so far. The thing is, this makes my Macbook almost useless to me. I always use my Macbooks wi-fi to connect online. At least I did until yesterday.

At this point it seems nobody knows the exact cause of the problem but lets hope Apple fixes the problem soon. Until then I have a horrible cat5 cord connected to my laptop. How did we ever function before wi-fi?

Author: Kevin Doyle

Trainer @bloginstructor, Blogger, Gamer, Geek, Columbus Crew Fan,  Fan, Technical Trainer & Guitar Player. Filtering your junk since 76'.

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Posted in Apple

Tagged macbook, wireless

Easy Macbook Updates

Posted on March 17, 2008 by Kevin Doyle | 6 Comments

Macbook

My much beloved Macbook is now going on eighteen months old. For a child, eighteen months is nothing but for a laptop it’s middle aged by todays technology standards. It’s slowly but surely approaching its golden years and I had a choice to make, retire or update. I chose to update for two reasons:

Short of a few minor issues it still runs great.
Financially its a wiser decision – ($300 in upgrades or $1500 for a newbie).

So for a little more than $300 and an hour or two, here is what I was able to do:

RAM - Upgraded to 2GB of RAM from the standard 1GB. I was also able to use one of the old 512MB sticks in my work laptop…bonus!
Hard Drive – Upgraded to a 250GB drive from the standard 80GB. I am going to re-purpose the 80GB drive to a portable drive.
OS Upgrade - Upgraded to OSX Leopard from the standard OSX Tiger. To be honest I picked this up a while ago (launch day). The iChat screen sharing feature alone was worth the cost.

The only other thing I may need to do is replace the battery. Its up to over 300 cycles now and has recently started acting up while charging but I am going to stop by the Genius Bar as I think it might be a genuine problem. The battery is covered by a two year warranty so maybe I can pick a new one FOC.

If your laptops getting a little over the hill, some minor (and easy to do) upgrades may be your best bet to speed things up and keep it running for another eighteen months.