Mac OS X 10.6.6 Upgrade and slow Internet?

[Simon]

I did the easy upgrade to version 10.6.6 of OS X and then spent a good part of yesterday trying to figure out why my sites were loading so slowly. Eventually I realized it wasn't just my sites (which was a relief for a few minutes) and then spent a lot of time trying to find out why everything was loading so slowly.

I did the usual things like running Disk Utility several times after the upgrade (always do that) and then booted into Safe Mode and ran it again. Then booted into Single-User mode and ran fsck from the command line. But didn't see any improvements.

After searching the various Mac boards this morning I found one suggestion that immediately resulted in faster browsing and loading times, so I thought I'd post it here in case anyone else runs into the slowdown problem.

I connect to a cable modem via an AirPort Wi-Fi connection, so this fix may not apply if you connect via Ethernet or some other mode. But if you use an AirPort Base Station or AirPort Express, the fix I found was to simply switch to a different Airport channel. I'm not sure why that worked, but I'm guessing it also resets some other things and that made the difference.

If you're not sure how to do this, here are the steps to take:

Make sure you know your AirPort Base Station password (find it in your Keychain if you saved it there).

Open the AirPort Utility program (found in Applications/Utilities).

Select the AirPort Base Station or AirPort Express you want to manage in the column on the left.

Click Manual Setup (enter your password if needed)

Click AirPort in the Toolbar and then click Wireless in the selections below the Toolbar.

In the Channel popup menu choose a different channel that whatever you've been using (you can see what you're using in the Summary screen).

Enter your wireless network password twice.

Click the Update button and wait for your Airport Base Station to be reset.

Quit the AirPort Utility program.

See if surfing and loading is faster now.


-- Hope that helps.