Mac Gurus Needed for Problem Resolution

[Strong Eagle]

Folks, here is the situation. My sister in law (SIL) has a Comcast cable connection, which is accessed via the cable modem and a Linksys wifi router.

SIL and husband use a Mac laptop and an iPad to access the internet. For two months now, their internet browsing has been absolutely horrible... websites like CNN or MarketWatch take forever to come up, if they do at all, and usually all pictures are not loaded.

As a side note, the Mac laptop has been direct connected to the cable modem with a cat5 cable with the same exact result.

They have been blaming it on Comcast cable because they can take their iPad and/or Mac to another network (friend or office) and they do not suffer this kind of browsing problem. Comcast has come out three times and they swear the broadband connection is working just fine.

I went over to their house last night and brought by Windows 7 laptop. We fired up broswers (Safari for the iPad and Mac), and Chrome for the Win 7 machine. We all were connected to the internet via the Linksys wifi.

The result: I was able to connect to any and all websites without issue. Meanwhile, they cannot connect to the exact same website. They are able to send/receive email and I was able to open a Skype video conversation which they were able to see without issue.

I had my SIL load Chrome for Mac onto her Mac laptop to see if this was a browser issue. Chrome behaved exactly the same way, that is, SIL could not access the internet.

To summarize:

a) The Mac and iPad browse just fine when using a different network
b) The Mac cannot browse even when hard connected to the cable modem
c) I was able to browse all websites (at high speed) and at the same time, they could not.

I think this eliminates Comcast as the source of the problem, and I think that the hardwire test eliminates issues with the wifi system (as does my ability to connect). But, now I have no idea what the issue might be.

Thoughts, anyone?

TIA

[OracleOfQuantico]

pls try, hopefully will work:

for the Mac, go to System Preferences > Network/Advanced > TCP/IP tab.
see if "Using DHCP with manual address' is selected.
if it is, then change it to 'Using DHCP' then click 'Renew DHCP Lease'.

This basically renew the IP address assigned to mac.

for the ipad, go to settings > wifi > click Renew lease

or try this thing i found in the apple support site by "Rigelface"

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/25 ... 0&tstart=0

====================
Hey guys. I have one of the newest generation of Macbooks and started having this problem earlier this week with my school network.

I just solved it (seemingly stupidly) and would like to offer my solution just in case it might help anyone.

What I did was as follows:
Open: System Preferences>>Network

At the left, there should be a pane listing ways in which your computer connects to the internet (Ethernet, VPN, AirPort, etc.)

At the bottom of this pane there are (+)(-)(cog) buttons that correspond to (add method)(remove method)(other options dropdown)

Highlight: Airport and hit - to remove.
Immediately hit + and choose AirPort (on mine it is default) for the interface type.
Click: Create

That somehow allowed my AirPort to fully connect again.

This seems gimicky, but I do hope it helps some of you out! Don't know how long the renewed effect lasts as I just did it within the last few minutes.

====================

[Strong Eagle]

Thanks for the pointers... I'll try them out.

[JR8]

I'm no expert, but have used http://www.speedtest.net/ to measure and benchmark performance.

Might be of help in diagnosing potential issues.

[zzm9980]

Sounds like a DNS problem... Specifically I wonder if your Windows laptop has a hard-coded DNS in there for better performance (Like Google or OpenDNS)

Check to see if their Mac and your Windows laptop are using the same DNS servers ->
- System Prefs, Network, then Airport or Ethernet on the Mac
- Properties of local area connection on your Windows laptop. Or, from command prompt type "ipconfig /all"

If they're using the same DNS servers, try pinging the sites from each system.
- On Windows, open cmd prompt and ping whatever.com
- On Mac, open Terminal (inside Utilities folder inside of Applications folder) and same thing.