New iMac, but wireless internet slow.

newtoboards

I bought new iMac yesterday and last night set it up. Internet connection very very slow, connecting via eircom netopia wirelss router. Sitting with dell laptop beside and page load time was lightening fast in comparison. Don't have a speettest link as I'm not at home currently but I'll post that this evening. Any suggestions would be great.

crawler

Could be lots of things....

Some people find changing DNS on the Mac works well ( http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=358919 )

For others, it makes no difference.

When you get home maybe try the above and also post a pic of the Airport settings and a speedtest.

If it works ok on your Dell then it's likely to be something very simple and easy to fix

Also as the mac is new - it may be doing "out of the box" stuff that gives the perception of it being slow - check internet activity also...

newtoboards

Sorry I should have said in my original post, I did the DNS update last night and one other thing I got from the apple forums and although the apple forums thing (which shouldn't have made a difference) increased the speed a bit it didn't do a good job. The DNS update could have been partly responsible though for that increase!!

newtoboards

Thanks for that link, I had a good root around in that forum and there's one more thing to try so I'll see how that goes and post up the speedtest this evening

bloke

If you run a ping to your router from a terminal window on the mac do you see much packet loss?

I had a similar issue on my (original intel) imac on purchase and it was related to the wireless security protocol. There was a bug in the wireless authentication / encryption implementation when used with certain routers that caused terrible packet loss (>10%) and obvious slowdown.

Changing from WEP to WPA fixed it for me. Other people were the opposite...

Now, I would have thought it was fixed by now but you could try changing security protocol (or disable temporarily) and see if it's related?

newtoboards

Thanks all for your suggestions, what I've done that works. Downloaded firefox mozilla, used the openDNS addresses and used a "home" network instead of the automatic setting that is default on mac's. Thanks for the mac forums links, full of handy tips and tricks!