Chosen Solution
I have a 2006 macbook CoreDuo. I ran into a diminishing airport reception problem like many I’ve read about on the web. I changed the airport card a few months ago and the problem persists, with a little change to it. Instead of steadily losing bars of reception, now it works fine until it drops the connection, when I try to reconnect to the basestation it asks me for the password again, even though it’’s saved and can , access it at other times. Then it times out trying to connect to the basestation. It cannot connect to the basestation again, unless I put it to sleep, or restart it. Restarting it results in a longer time that I can stay connected before it drops again, but putting it to sleep even for seconds will allow it to reconnect again, with me doing nothing at all. The thing I think is causing this that I can tell is the temperature. It happens predictably when I am streaming video, as this gets my machine hot and the fan working at maximum. I’ve also started to have Random Shutdowns as I’ve read about that were happening in earlier model Macbooks than mine, that were being caused by heatsink problems and were corrected in a firmware update. All of this leads me to believe I have a problem with my heatsink or airport card wires running over a heatsink, something like that. Does anyone have an opinion on this. I know it’s a little convoluted but I’ve been living with this airport problems for about a year now, since before i installed the new card 6 mos. ago. Thanks for your help
Hi, I definitely think your problem is heat related so I am including the link for repair of your computer. I would open it up and recheck the connection of the airport card and clean the fan assembly. And while I was at it I would remove the heat sink–clean it and reinstall with fresh thermal paste. If possible with the heat intensive work you do you could look into one of those laptop stands with a fan to help keep temperatures down. Good luck. MacBook Core Duo Repair
This is all I can tell you without pictures When you change thermal pads, you can’t use the old ones, they have to be replaced(I will refurbish dell’s using spare parts, during testing, I found this out even tough I was warned, you learn some things making mistakes)! Buy a new thermal pad and try this out
I was having the same problem till one day the thing said I had no airport card detected. I uninstalled wireless display from the utilities menu and it has ceased ever since. heat did seem to play a roll but before I ever had the problem my machine would still run hot and never had the problem then. Cheers, iAN
