I don’t know about you, but since upgrading to Mac OS X Lion, I have been having some serious issues with WiFi – every 5 minutes, WiFi was dropping. So I had to turn off WiFi then turn it back on, sometimes doing this 3-4 times before I actually picked up WiFi, and then 5 minutes later it would drop again. Major problem. The thing was, I KNEW it wasn’t my router because my iPod and PC were still connected, and running flawlessly. I run a Late 2009 iMac, and some users on Twitter who also own a late 2009 iMac have been having the same issues as myself, so I knew I wasn’t an isolated incident. I wasn’t having any of these issues in Snow Leopard.
So, I was searching around the interwebs and came across an Apple Discussions thread which led to this website called Rys Sommefeldt which was actually, extremely interesting.
To cut a long story short here, the Late 2009 iMacs use a piece of hardware called the Etheros WiFi card which basically drives the WiFi on the iMac. Without drivers, this hardware is useless. When upgrading to Lion, the Etheros Driver software is also upgraded to V4.0 which has a MASSIVE bug which renders WiFi next to useless on Mac OS X Lion. Not surprisingly, it says that Snow Leopard used a different version of the driver – V3.2 which is bug free – the obvious solution? Downgrade to 3.2. Well, this method can be quite vigourous if you don’t have the required files because it would mean that you’d have to go deep into the core of SL to find the files, which the average user has no idea how to do.
Luckily, however, Rys Sommefeldt has made these files available to us, and these files can be downloaded by the link in the description of the YouTube video below.
Since doing this downgrade to Etheros Driver V3.2, I have had no WiFi drops, so I am confident that this downgrade has solved my issue. If you own a Late 2009 iMac but haven’t been having these issues, I still recommend that you downgrade to 3.2 – better safe than sorry!
This downgrade will NOT affect your OS apart from downgrading the Etheros WiFi Driver to V3.2 from V4.0.
*UPDATE – This downgrade removes AirDrop from your OS. If you’re needing to use AirDrop on a regular basis, do not perform this downgrade!
