Imac has lost its once strong wireless signal

November 22, 2009 4:25 PM

My girlfriend's imac keeps losing its wireless signal, despite having functioned perfectly for over a year at its present location. How can I remedy this?

The wireless router - a linksys wrt 54g - is located at my desk about 50 feet and one wall away, where it is hardwired to my pc. For the past year, her imac received the signal perfectly. And now it's extremely weak. Rebooting her computer, my computer, the router, or the cable modem does nothing to improve her signal. Yet my other computer - a pc laptop - receives a perfectly good signal next to her imac.

She is running osx 10.4.11
I'm on vista

posted by ranunculus to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Might be a problem with her computers wireless reciever, given that your computer is picking up a perfect signal and it sounds like her computer has only just started playing up.

Do you have Applecare? Take it into an authorised Apple repairer. They can test it for you and, if needed, will fix it too.
posted by Effigy2000 at 4:31 PM on November 22, 2009

Change the channel on the router to one that's not being used by a lot of other networks in your area.
posted by kindall at 5:48 PM on November 22, 2009

AirPort cards do get weak and go bad. Check its status in System Profiler (Apple Menu>About this Mac>More Info> Network>AirPort card).

And, the card may just need to be physically reseated/connected.
The card is usually pretty easy to access (see the manual).
posted by artdrectr at 10:33 PM on November 22, 2009

Have you updated your OS recently? I remember using 10.4.x where I had wireless issues on certain versions.
posted by wongcorgi at 11:17 PM on November 22, 2009