I own an 11” 2011 MacBook Air and have never had a single problem with it, which is happily the experience of most Apple owners. Recently, however, I’ve noticed fussiness with Wi-Fi.
See, technicians at Small Dog are tasked with not only repairing computers but also speaking on the phone with customers and potential customers who call into the support line. Most of us listen to music while we’re working, but it’s hard to have a conversation with that background sound. I usually just pause Spotify when talking to customers, and occasionally this pause can last up to a half hour. My device will then go to sleep because it’s using its battery.
For the past couple of months, when trying to pick up where I left off on a particular song, I’ve observed that it will continue playing what has been buffered, then abruptly stops where the network connection timed out. I then have to wait several minutes for it to reconnect to our familiar repair network by turning off Wi-Fi for a moment then turning it back on.
If this happened every once in a while, I wouldn’t care at all but it became a consistent annoyance. As a technician, I was inclined to try all sorts of crazy troubleshooting techniques but discovered a far simpler solution, one that I would have recommended to a customer calling with the same issue:
System Preferences > Network > Wi-Fi > Advanced
Then, select the Wi-Fi network normally used and click the “-” symbol to remove it from Preferred Networks. If it has a password, the next step is to open Keychain Access, select the “login” keychain, order the list by Kind, and remove all AirPort network password types.
NOTE: Do not attempt this unless you know what your wireless router’s password is or unless you know how to manually reset it if necessary! We have no way of knowing what that is, so if you attempt this process and cannot reconnect, we won’t be able to assist you.
More information for your first line of troubleshooting network problems can be found here.