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why are you hurting me internet
flowerhoney
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
okay so... my wifi connection in seriously mentally challenged.
basically, I've always had trouble using the internet in my room (the router is located downstairs while my room is upstairs, on the other side of the house). Its always been a struggle to connect, but usually I can eventually get it to work. My dad recently bought a new router, an apple router since everyone in the family has a mac, to fix the problem.
For awhile, everything was okay and everyone could use the internet just fine. But recently, the internet has stopped working in my room. I get full signal strength, but I can never get an IP address or it says I have a "self assigned IP address and can't connect to the internet". How is this possible?! Actually I dont know much about computers so maybe this is actually really normal.
Also, I've been having trouble connecting all over the house, the connection will suddenly drop and the computer will insist that I'm either using the wrong password or the connection has timed out. The connection usually comes back if I stand right in front of the damn router. If I take my mom's laptop into my room, I still lose connection, so I know its not just my computer. We both have macbook pros
I've looked online and haven't found anything useful, and I dont know if the person at the genius bar can help. This happened once before and my dad just reset the router. I dont want to just have to be constantly resetting it!
Any help is super appreciated!!! Thanks!
basically, I've always had trouble using the internet in my room (the router is located downstairs while my room is upstairs, on the other side of the house). Its always been a struggle to connect, but usually I can eventually get it to work. My dad recently bought a new router, an apple router since everyone in the family has a mac, to fix the problem.
For awhile, everything was okay and everyone could use the internet just fine. But recently, the internet has stopped working in my room. I get full signal strength, but I can never get an IP address or it says I have a "self assigned IP address and can't connect to the internet". How is this possible?! Actually I dont know much about computers so maybe this is actually really normal.
Also, I've been having trouble connecting all over the house, the connection will suddenly drop and the computer will insist that I'm either using the wrong password or the connection has timed out. The connection usually comes back if I stand right in front of the damn router. If I take my mom's laptop into my room, I still lose connection, so I know its not just my computer. We both have macbook pros
I've looked online and haven't found anything useful, and I dont know if the person at the genius bar can help. This happened once before and my dad just reset the router. I dont want to just have to be constantly resetting it!
Any help is super appreciated!!! Thanks!
flowerhoney on
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If you're having problems with IPs and with the router deciding you aren't providing the right authentication, the problem is likely that something in your connection settings isn't what it's supposed to be per the router. I don't really know anything about how macs manage those things though.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
The router actually doesn't have an antenna, our old one used to and getting the antennas to point in the right direction usually helped.
I have no idea why the setting would be different in that one part of the house
yeah I know, macs are supposed to be all easy but when it comes to technical stuff they're really good at fucking things up and being complicated...
sorry this problem is so ridiculous, maybe the mac store is my best bet
When you say "house" do you mean apartment/townhome/row house/condo? or do you mean a house, with space between you and the neighbors?
Secondly, when you go to a PC near your router and you type: http://192.168.1.1 or http://192.168.1.254 into your web browser, do you get a set of config pages for your router? If so, you can look at your Wireless config pages, and turn the antenna power up to 10. It'll probably be set at 4-6. That might help. You can also change the channel the router uses. Pick one of the "standard" ones in the list... your config page should tell you which ones are common. I use 6 or 10.
Next, look into a Linksys or Netgear signal booster. It's just a little thing that you set up once, then you plug it into an electrical socket somewhere in the house and it boosts your signal range. Here's one that might work, but there are others around.
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My initial guess is that someone else has turned up a new router on the same channel as yours, and is knocking down your wireless range. Interference in the wireless world appears to a user as range decrease, and that's what you're experiencing. A signal booster should solve all your issues.
I thought the goal of picking a channel was to avoid the more commonly used ones to try and reduce interference?
It could be that someone in between you and the router turned on a tv/microwave/etc.
Not really. TVs and microwaves don't create any interference that will affect a 2.4ghz signal. In a home, the only 'etc' you'd really need to wonder about is an AC unit, and those are almost always outside.
Sometimes a thick concrete slab will attenuate an 802.11 signal, but that would have been a fact from the beginning. OP seems to have changed the router at some point, so that could also be a factor. At the edge of a wireless router's range, orientation of the antenna (it's inside the router) is important. A 20 degree change in the angle could make a difference.
It's really hard to know the cause without seeing the location itself... which is why most solutions amount to "boost signal power, switch channels, extend core range". Troubleshooting them in more finely grained ways is pretty hard, and usually gets you very little return on your time investment.
Edit: one thing I've noticed since I started taking iPhones and the iPad into my house is that, on occasion, the wireless signal just gets... well, fucked up. That's the only way to describe it. Before I had an iPhone and iPad from the office, this never happened... and by never I mean not once in 5 years. Devices can no longer connect, even with full power. The android phones can't connect, the iPad complains. Power cycling the router (via actually unplugging it, not a software reset) will sort this out. It's probably happened twice in the last 6 months, and I have absolutely no explanation for it whatsoever. I spent about 4 hours one evening trying every damned thing I could think of to get the router to hand out IP addresses, and in the end I just said "EFF THIS", yanked the power, and counted to 30 while I resisted the urge to throw the router across the room. When I plugged it back in, everything worked great.
Tell that to the microwave and router at my house. When we used to have a computer in a rec room on one end of the house and the router in a bedroom on the other end, I could kill the network connection by turning on the microwave without fail.
When I said microwave, I meant the appliance, not the electromagnetic waves.
Well, any appliance with a motor turning something can throw off enough broad-spectrum interference to cause intermittent issues. An elevator down the hall can wreck your shit in mysterious and confounding ways. Load on the motor can matter too... you might be OK with a bowl of oatmeal in your microwave, but not a whole chicken. It's challenging to discern the correct pattern from the noise sometimes. For most people though, wifi and microwave ovens are both basically magic. Saying "your microwave might be interfering with your wifi" conjures up an image of micro waves colliding with wireless waves and... yeah.
Motors can affect signal! Don't put old crappy ones in between your computer and your wireless access point.