My MacBook Pro has been misbehaving of late – whilst other computers and my iPhone can faultlessly connect to any WiFi network, my MBP seems to grow tired of networks over a time period; First it started dropping connection to my Netgear wifi access point at home. Sometimes it would connect and wouldn’t get an IP address, other times it would appear to connect, but I couldn’t access the interwebs or ping local network devices. Othertimes it would inform me that none of my preferred networks are available, whilst listing the available networks – including my preferred! Trying to connect would just time out. Was the access point on its way out? I was also having issues with the WiFi at my office, so maybe it was the MBP?
I bought a Buffalo router (cheap as chips) and as it was N-150, it flew along. For about a week. Again connection issues would crop up almost daily. Toggling wifi on/off on the MBP would occasionally fix the issue for a few minutes. A restart didn’t always fix it. Clearing the NVRAM on boot seemed to do the trick for a week or two. Alas, I still have problems.
Meanwhile the WiFi at my office was upgraded to Cisco routers – these should work right? Nope. Not with the MBP. IPhone – yep. Any other wifi device? Flawless. Great.
After much searching I may now have a fix: Trashing the config files in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration. Copy these files to somewhere safe and delete one file at a time (make a note of which ones you have tried) and restart the mac each time. So far I have only deleted ‘com.apple.airport.preferences.plist’ and things are working ok again – but only time will tell.
I found this fix on the apple support forums, where the original post includes a breakdown of the above process if you’re not experienced with rooting around your hard drive outside of your user folder. Depressingly, you might also notice that there aren’t a shortage of posts about WiFi issues… so you’re not alone!
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