i just got a brand new macbook 2 days ago and immediately noticed that there was something funky about airport. i have a WEP-secured home wireless network. my wifi router is a netgear wgr614v5 and it is hooked up to my adsl modem. i have an imac (running snow leopard) which is connected to the router via the ethernet card. i have a 4 year old ibook hooked up to this network wirelessly running leopard. this laptop is not on most of the time. intermittently i will hook into this wireless network with my iphone and ipod touch.

everything was fine until i tried connecting my new macbook. it dropped wifi signal a few times during the 1st few hours of use. this was very disconcerting to say the least. initially i thought it was the position i was in and had something to do with distance. when i moved out of a 5 meter radius i could not connect to the internet at all. however when i moved closer it could pick up the signals.

after more testing i realised that it was dropping signals regardless of where i was especially after closing the lid and allowing the laptop to go to sleep. when the lid is reopened it takes about 5-10 seconds to reconnect and sometimes it just sits there until i turn airport off and then on again.

i have currently assigned it a fixed ip address to see whether it will stabilise. the reasoning behind is that i have noticed that i do not get connected if the automatically assigned ip goes beyond 192.168.1.5.

one more thing is that i see that airport is constantly searching for network even after it has established a stable connection with my home network. is this normal?

1st thing i did when i got the laptop.