Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been having network problems with my iMac, and, horror of horrors, have even reverted to my XP running laptop instead. No, I’m going to stop myself right here. It’s not that painful for me to switch back to Windows as I use it all day at work, and my reliable Dell Inspiron kicks in and connects more or less every time I switch it on. I’ve only had the blue screen of death once, and that was because Norton had decided to kill it, not Mr Gates’ wonder emporium. I had offended the omni-present satan of anti-virus software by daring to install a Nod32 product and merely ‘uninstalling’ Norton’s evil equivalent first. Silly me. Nod32 is a far superior product by the way – I think it’s technically called ESET Smart Security – and I urge anyone who’s still using Norton, McAfee and whatever other rubbish is out there to investigate more on their website. If you’re looking for a way to rid yourself of all things Norton – check out the Norton Removal Tool.

So, back to my Mac… I’ve been experiencing very crap reception to my wireless network (provided by a Netgear DG834GT wireless router), and just before the weekend, I started getting the dreaded message ‘There was an error connecting to the Airport network…’. It could see the network, and others, but it just wouldn’t connect. I’m a Mac beginner, and had no idea how to solve it. My laptop, my iPhone, and the other PC in the house were all connecting fine, a good job, because I used them to trawl the forums for answers.

Nothing.

Today, having bunked off work early to go and pick up my foreign currency for my rather exciting holiday next week, I had a couple of hours to spare and decided to solve it. I lugged the whole thing downstairs to right next to the router. It could see it, but it couldn’t connect. I figured it wasn’t a problem with the Airport card.

I restrict access to my wireless network by MAC address, so Just for a quick try I deleted the iMac’s MAC address from the approved list on the router, and then re-entered it. I don’t know why, but it worked. Full reception, no problems. Obviously now I’ve moved the whole set up back upstairs, the reception’s gone rubbish again, but at least I can check Facebook now.

I’ll worry about the rest of it later…