I own a first generation MacBook. But I don’t think I’m a hardcore Mac fanboy. So I’m gonna admit that there is an annoying problem that has been bothering me (although it’s pretty much the only complain I have). The problem is that the Airport will drop wireless connection from time to time when the MacBook is running on battery. After a couple of months of researching, I found this forum thread. Two of the tricks mentioned in the thread worked for me. First I tried switching to WPA2 pre-shared key only and using TKIP+AES algorithm. It worked perfectly for the MacBook. But I have other two stone age laptops with prehistoric 802.11b wireless cards which don’t support WPA2. That left me with the second option: ping some host (hey, what about www.google.com) every 5 seconds. It’s super lame but it does serve the purpose. Now I just wish I knew some OS X programming so that I could start or stop the ping depending on whether the laptop is plugged in or not.
It’s worth mentioning that the problem seems to only exist with consumer grade routers. When I was at Vancouver airport, I was able to use its wireless network without interruption for hours.
