Internet Access Sluggish or Non-existent

[greg]

Well then, based on your experiences with the router eliminated, it certainly does sound like a Mac/Linksys issue. I did a quick search and found quite a few reported problems with Macs and this particular router.

One more suggestion; You may want to try adding the IP address of your BEFSR41 in the DNS portion of your network settings. I've seen this mentioned also as a possible solution.
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2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB RAM
miniStack 500GB
Dell 1905FP
Logitech Wave Cordless Desktop

[bwebb]

I tried the IP address of the BEFSR41 in the DNS settings with no luck. Is anyone using this router successfully with OS X 10.4.1 ? Linksys hasn't been very helpful. Does anyone have a suggestion for a replacement router? I need to support both PCs and the Mini. Thanx
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bwebb

[EL34]

I'll add my observations to the pile...

After years in Windows world I took delivery of my first Mac (pictured here: http://flickr.com/photos/68175269@N00/22009507/in/set-510299/ ) about 10 days ago. The browsing is painfully slow - like dialup slow even though I'm on DSL. The computer sits near a 2 year old Windows computer with a 2.5 gig P4 and web pages pop up in less than 2 seconds off my 1.5meg DSL connection. On the Mac it's 8-10 seconds the first time I visit the page in a session but much faster on reloads, which led me to suspect DNS is the problem. The theory is that after visiting a page then the IP address is in DNS cache so the browser doesn't have to contact the DNS server again until the cache expires or gets flushed.

After I installed Firefox on the Mac and turned on the status bar I now believe the problem is DNS because the hangup definitely is the "Looking up..." part. After entering a URL and htting "enter" the browser sits at "Looking up WWW.Whatever.com" for way too long. If I save the webpage to the desktop and play it off the harddrive it snaps right up. I tried the earlier suggestions of turning off IPV6 and entering the router address into the list of DNS servers but the problem remains. I'm gonna reboot everything after I type this and I'll post a followup if that fixes it. Again, I get no such snag on the Windows box so the problem is only happening on the Mac.

For reference: My DSL is Qwest and the Actiontec modem has a built in wireless router which works fine with the Windows PC and the Windows notebook which runs off the wireless. The PC and the Mac both go though a Dlink switch on the way to the router.

Waiting 10 seconds for a web page to load is no fun when the same page loads in 2 seconds on the PC sitting next to it. I hope we solve this mystery soon

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<edit>

Ok, very good news I rebooted the Mac and the router and the slow browsing has disappeared. I'm guessing that turning off the IPV6 and the computer reboot did the trick. Or possibly putting the gateway address in the place for DNS servers. But I'm gonna guess it was the IPV6. Whatever, pages are popping up fast now in both Safari and Firefox. If anything changes I'll add another post.
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[bwebb]

Final post on this subject. I replaced the Linksys BEFSR41 router with a new D-Link DI-604. All problems solved.
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bwebb