Fixed: slow wifi on Mac OS X 10.5.5
For a few weeks now, my home wireless has been unbearably slow on my Mac, while my Vista PC [ironically] has been fine. I remembered updating to Mac OS X 10.5.5 about the time the problem started, and a look around the net revealed quite a few other people with similar symptoms. Earlier this evening I tried pinging my wireless router and was getting between 100ms-1000ms response times on the Mac – it should be around 2-8ms, so something was definitely wrong. Fortunately I found a simple solution…
Reboot holding down the SHIFT key to boot in Safe Mode. It may take a while to boot (this is normal), log in as yourself, and then restart your Mac. Once you’ve restarted and logged back in, you should hopefully find your wifi connection working properly again. I guess the safe mode boot clears out some old caches or kick starts something back to life. Who knows, but it worked!
stevebirney 9:15 pm on December 5, 2008 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Thank you!
This worked perfectly. My mini is 10 feet from my time capsule and it not working well was driving me crazy.
jfredley 4:15 pm on October 8, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply
More recent SSLLOOWW response with a latest and greatest BELKIN N wifi router(up to 300MBPS – 150 is the best I’ve experienced- better than wired though @100 MBPS) and a MAC with OS X 10.5.8. Wired or WIlreless the BELKIN took up to minutes to respond with pages. Switched out to an old CISCOLinksys POC WGT54GS and great turnaround… Any ideas??? jfredley@hotmail
jfredley 4:17 pm on October 8, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply
P.S I tried the “SAFE boot” to no avail….
Eavesdropper 5:41 am on February 1, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Thank you so much for posting this info. My girlfriend has been complaining since I put her on the wireless router about her connection. I tried changing the channel the wireless was on and a few other things, but couldn’t figure this out. I tried this and it worked like a charm.
Dave 10:03 pm on February 1, 2010 Permalink
Hi, glad it helped
Just out of interest, what version of OS X are you on? This post gets a lot of views despite originally being for 10.5.5 – so if it worked for later versions, I’d like everyone to know.
Thanks