My MacBook Pro’s wireless connectivity started acting up a few days ago out of the blue, and now my wireless connection drops every few minutes for no apparent reason. Ug, WTH. My Dell laptop’s wireless connection works fine though.

I first thought that maybe one of my neighbors bought a new 2.4Ghz cordless phone, and it was wreaking havoc on my internets, but that wouldn’t explain why my Dell laptop would hold its wireless connection. My router is transmitting on a channel by itself, so it’s not likely interference from the neighbors’ access points. Everyone was either on channel 6 or 11, and I was the lone person using channel 1.

Thinking that my Linksys WRT54G wifi router has seen better days, I went out and bought a new router(a D-Link DIR-655), as I noticed that my Apple Airport Express in the living room was loosing its connection to the Linksys more often than usual as well (the AE is set up as a WDS repeater to the signal coming from my the Linksys). I admittedly just wanted some new shiny to play with. I mean, who wouldn’t want to have a draft N router with gigabit Ethernet ports?

The problems didn’t seem to go away, and ends up that some googling resulted in a lot of reports of randomly dropped wi-fi connections using OS X 10.4.10. Sigh. I’m not sure why mine just started all of a sudden. I tried downgrading to the 10.4.9 airport files but that didn’t seem to help, so I’m gonna revert back to the 10.4.10 version and suck it up for a few more days before Leopard (10.5) comes out & hope for the best.

At least in my searching for an answer, I found a fix to a semi-related issue — that of the OS X airport process taking up 100% CPU — upgrading to VMWare Fusion 1.1beta fixed that.