Airport Constantly Scanning
 

My Airport card in my new iMac is constantly "scanning" so that when it does this my Internet connection pretty much sucks. I've seen lots of posts elsewhere, but none here concerning this problem. They usually tie this problem to OSX 10.5.2. I have always received good responses on these forums. So, any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

What kind of internet connection do you have from your iMac, wired, or wireless?

What kind of router are you connected to, please give brand and model.

When you say your card is scanning, please tell us in great detail exactly where you see that information, or how you infer that it is scanning.

Trevor

I have a cable Internet connection running through a wireless Linksys WRT54G router. Pretty standard router. Everything else is running normally, my XBOX and my Vonage device.
Now, when I click on the airport status icon up in the top left of my screen where you would select what network you want to connect to. The first line below the icon, when I click on it, is constantly going back and forth between "airport : on" and "airport : scanning." When it is scanning I basically lose my connection for my iMac. It supposedly has something to do with 10.5.2, according to other forums. I've never had this issue before.

Create a brand new network Location, and enter your router connection information into the new Location. Does the problem go away?

Trevor

Are you connected to the Internet through the Airport or a wired connection? If the later, you may want to change the Service Order in Network preferences (under the gear icon in 10.5.x) so that the Built-in Internet has higher priority.

i dont know if this will help. but i noticed that i uninstalled parallels and switched to vmware fusion however in my network preferences i still had parallels admin and guest listed there and they said connected. since i dont use parallels anymore i deleted these and my airport stopped the continuos scanning. it was always scanning until i did this.

This is a problem with 10.5.2
 

I bet you folks upgraded to 10.5.2, didn't you? So did I...on my MacBook Pro, and the constant Airport scanning began soon after. My wife's MacBook, on the other hand, still has 10.5.1, and is not exhibiting those problems on the same network. There is an Apple Discussions forum on this very topic. Just go into Apple Discussions and search for "Airport constantly scanning, 10.5.2", and you should see the thread, or click here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread....readID=1397364

There are about 3000 people watching, with around 60+ posts, including one of my own.

Yes, I have experienced this one as well with an Airport Extreme 802.11n basestation. I can tell there is a lot of interference present in the form of other nearby access points, but definitely much worse in 10.5.2.

Same here. It seems to depend on the basestation and 10.5.2 - we recently changed our DSL service which came with a free (different) wireless router. I was fine on the old router, but just switching to the new router and I have the problem.

Edit - *Never Mind* Just happened. :(

At first blush, the Security Update 2008-002 seems to be helping with this, for reasons which are not obvious.

Anyone else notice this?

Same behavior here with airport constantly scanning.
iMac core2duo, 10.5.2, ol' airport express->D-link router->cable modem

I see no adverse effects, however.
Haven't installed latest sec update yet.

OK, there was an AirPort driver/Time Machine update issued for 10.5.2+ today. Let's see what that does...

I just bought my new MacBook Pro less than 12 hours ago, after agonizing for months over the switch from PC. Less than two hours after I take it out of the box, it starts doing this. I can't get a consistent signal to save my life and I am near tears from frustration. (Seriously, this is why I LEFT PCs, because everyone assured me Macs don't cause that kind of frustration.)

I am, obviously, new to Macs, so some of the more complicated solutions are making no sense to me. I connected the computer directly to the modem so I could download the updates, and the Airport update seemed to fix the problem for about 20 minutes, but now I'm back to the same old, same old.

Most of the information I've found online about this problem is pretty out of date. Is there a solution? If I call Apple Care can they help me? I am ready to go back to my much hated PC at this point.

Hi SarahJanet, welcome to the forum.

Have you installed ALL of the updates available through Software Update?

Trevor

The Fix!
 

Remove the internet connection status from the menubar via network pref.

seems to clear it up!~

:D

How do you do this? I have the same problem and I am OS 10.5.4 with an Apple Extreme.
I can only find system prefs not netwrok prefs?
Tks

A Thousand Thank Yous
 

I've been tearing my hair out for months over this. I've tried so many things including a new router. This fix was so simple. Thank you again. :D

Wait...
 

Drat! It seemed to work for a few minutes but now I'm back to the endless waiting. Sigh. :(

Same issue on my Macbook. Scans... sees my network and a neighbors', knows it is to choose mine but scans away all the same.

Self Assigned IP and Scanning
 

Been trying to solve the same issue for months. Not only does it scan constantly, it has the self-assigned IP address which prevents it from doing anything.

Been reading and frankly all the methods suggested have not worked.

Sorely tempted to just wipe the drive clean and re-install Leopard (or just stick to Tiger - at least that one gave me no murderous ill will).

As much as I love Apple, they had better fix this as I'm seriously starting to think of diversifying my hardware interests.

Have you filed a bug report? If not, file one. If so, file another one. Apple doesn't host this forum and is not likely to troll it looking for user gripes.

What kind of encryption are you using on your wireless network? If it is WEP, try switching to WPA. Not only is WPA more secure than WEP, but it seems to be better supported by Apple.

I checked on one of the threads at this link http://discussions.apple.com/thread....readID=1397364as directed by user Macheel. One thing i found that worked for me was to go to SytemPreferences/Network and then unclick the "show airport status in menu bar" For whatever reason it works for me. I hate not being able to see the airport status but it sure speeds things up.

Airport Constantly Scanning
 

The computer will keep scanning for networks whenever the signal from the wireless router becomes too weak. I restarted the Airport base station and that cured the problem for a 10.5.8 MacBook Pro.

I've been a Mac consultant for decades and find that many Airport stations I come across are kind of flakey, either spontaneously resetting themselves to the default configuration or putting out a very weak signal with no network connection.

Don't forget that you don't need to buy an Airport station since any 3rd party wireless router will work.