Mac wireless strangeness

Let me start with a disclaimer - I have no clue whatsoever about macs!

Elaine has a new-ish MacBook Pro, and yesterday she started to complain that her internet was really slow. Indeed, when I checked, I got ping times of several thousands of milliseconds to our local router. As soon as I plugged in the ethernet cable, we were down into a few milliseconds as usual.

The wireless network here has 3 old Linksys basestations, using WEP.

Elaine did mention that there was some Apple software update a couple of days ago - could they have done something that broke good, old-fashioned WLAN?

Any hints?

Julf

Do you have another wireless computer to test on the wireless network? In other words, maybe it's the wireless router and not the macbook?

I've noticed that the cheap wireless routers simply need rebooting every once in a while, and doing so sometimes solves slowness problems.

Yes, but I don't think that was the case this time. The recent updates seem only to have to do with the .Mac to MobileMe transition. I wouldn't look at them as your first line of troubleshooting.

That said, you can see the updates and when they were applied by looking at the "Installed Updates" tab on the "Software Update" preference pane.

I don't remember any recent updates that touched anything wireless. Checking (Apple menu, System Preferences, Software Update, Installed Updates) shows nothing since early July with an OS X 10.5.4 and Airport update. Beyond that, it's been iTunes and Quicktime and some other multimedia updates.

Funny thing was that my Kubuntu laptop was working totally OK on the WLAN at the same time. But now, since booting the mac up this morning, it works OK again. Strange... We did reboot it yesterday trying to debug the problem, and that didn't help.