Mac WiFi Disconnects - Solved

I love our 20" iMac computer. The really only unfavorable thing I have to say about it is the poor WiFi connectivity to the Linksys wireless router, and unfortunately if you are like me I spend 90% of the time on the computer doing something online so it's really annoying when the connection drops or trivial web pages take forever to download. My other non-Mac computer which connect to the same router have no issue so it's really baffling and frustrating.

I'm blogging about this this because I know I'm not alone in this. And perhaps what I did to fix my problem will help anyone reading this with a similar issue. If you do a Google search you'll find literally hundreds of people with the same problem, with no resolution even from Apple themselves. Patches, new routers etc. don't seem to work. The symptoms are the WiFi radio indicator at the top left corner goes grey indicating that the computer has been disconnected from the router. It'll come back but only after you click on it and select your access point. Who can afford to do this every 10 seconds? I was also only averaging 2.4 Mb/s receive which is only 1/3 of what I'd expect.

I came to the conclusion that it must be periodically searching for other (or better) networks. I confirmed this by inspecting a little file called ~/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist. This is an XML file that contains your Airport WiFi settings, but it also seemed to have a bunch of old and outdated networks I configured previously, they don't even show up anywhere in the GUI Network configuration panes.

I just deleted it (yeah I have either a lot or courage or stupidity). Rebooted and re-setup my WiFi settings to the router. Rebooted again and voila, my network is fast and reliable. Check out my speed test results in the pic above. I hope this helps you.