Fixing slow WiFi on a MacBook running OS X
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This is unrelated to anything I’d normally ever write about on this blog, so put up with it.
When I got to my parents’ house in San Francisco, I found that the wifi was slow. Old-person-too-proud-for-a-wheelchair slow.
But the odd thing was, it was plenty fast on every single other computer in the house. It was just my MacBook and OS X that was that slow.
While investigating, I found that pure download speeds were perfect. It was just loading web pages that was slow. All online speed tests indicated the connection was perfect, but every web page loaded like I was on dial-up.
The point of this post is to provide the fix for this problem, since I don’t know how well-documented it is. All I had to do was go to my root hard drive (not my user-specific folder), go into the “Library” folder, go into the “Preferences” folder, throw away the “SystemConfiguration” folder, and then reboot. Everything was flawless after that.
(There are probably specific files in there you can toss out to fix the problem, but it just seems easier to toss the whole folder to solve the problem. Nothing gets hurt or lost in the process.)
I was running OS X 10.5.6 when this happened, but I’ve seen the problem happen in the past with older installations too. And I promise to never post anything this nerdy again.
June 11th, 2009 at 6:16 am
I’m beginning to think you don’t like to party. Hit me with something funny but touching.
October 28th, 2009 at 3:01 am
Thanks for the fix! It worked like a charm. Unfortunately, I will never get back the hours I spent previously trying to resolve this problem.
Thanks again.