Hi Tony,

I read your article about 10 tips for improving your wireless connection and I have a question for you.

I have an apple mac book pro computer and my husband has an ibm thinkpad. We moved into a new house in July and ever since we moved into our new house my wireless connection has not been working well at all – it is extremely slow but my husbands computer works great and has a very strong wireless connection. The strange thing is it worked fine at our last home with the same set up except that instead of using our apple airport we are now using a linksys router that is connected to our dsl modem. If I take my computer outside of the house and get on another wireless network the internet works fine. The other thing we have tested is actually hardwiring my computer into the router directly and it still didn’t work quickly at all so I am wondering if there is a problem with my computer (being an apple) with a linkys router?

Any ideas? I have been working on this issue off and on for a while now. We have even had our tech guy come out and take a look and he can’t seem to figure it out.

Thanks for you any ideas you may have.

First, let’s find a way to test the performance so we can see how bad it really is, and whether our changes fix the problem.

If you share files between computers on your network, find a big file (like a video) and copy it to another computer. Time how long it takes. Then, repeat that test after each change to determine if the problem is solved.

If you only use your computer to access the Internet, visit this Web performance test, and make note of the upload and download speeds. You could test this from both your Mac and the Thinkpad, and see how much performance differs.

Now, let’s start making some changes. Test performance after each step, and stop when things seem good:

1. Visit your router’s configuration page and install any firmware updates available.

2. Make sure your Mac has all updates installed, especially those related to network performance.

3. Visit your router’s wireless network configuration page. Set it to 802.11G, and disable any performance-boosting capabilities. Restart your Mac (or disconnect from the wireless network and reconnect).

4. Run network diagnostics on your Mac (which you can do from Safari).

5. On your Mac, delete the new network location, and then re-create it. Read this for more information about network locations (remember, I’m not a Mac guy).

6. Sell that Linksys and go back to your Airport router! I know, it’s tough to give up, but searching the Internet I found dozens of people complaining about Mac-Linksys connection problems and most of the never found a solution. Most wireless networks are highly compatible thanks to networking standards, but it’s still possible for a client and a wireless access point to suffer from performance problems because of the software implementations.

Let me know how it turns out!