A visit from the Angel of Connection Dropouts

Up until a few weeks ago, I had never had a problem with the wireless reception on my first-generation MacBook. Our house has a Linksys WRT54G on the main floor serving up a WPA2-secured network that covers the entire building without a problem. Upstairs in my room, I’d always gotten all four bars of signal. Then, very suddenly, my Mac started dropping connections regularly and seldom getting more than 1 or 2 bars. After a reboot, I fired up AirRadar and graphed the connection. This was the result:

Since the other MacBooks in the house weren’t having any problems, I figured the router was fine and my Mac was the problem. But was the hardware or software at fault? After disassembling my machine and finding nothing obviously awry, I had the idea to re-insert the old 60GB hard drive that it had originally shipped with, which I had never erased, to see if the frozen-in-time system it contained would fare any better. As it turned out, it did.

In other words, it’s a software problem. Security updates are usually to blame for causing (or revealing) random glitches like these, and since all the standard backtracking solutions haven’t been able to get things working properly (disabling unnecessary services, logging in as a different user, etc.), I’m thinking it’ll take a clean reinstall to completely clear this up. It’s been 2½ years since I got this Mac; it’s probably about time anyway.

Have you had this happen to your Mac? Did you ever narrow down the cause? Let me know either way.