I’m coming up on 3 months with my new MacBook Pro and I’ve been extremely happy with the simplicity and consistency of the experience. I still use a ThinkPad running XP at work, and have an XP desktop at home, but the MacBook is my machine of choice. I have, however, struggled with some Internet connection issues.
From Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cliph/
First, my router would occasionally stop resolving domain names. I could ping an IP address directly, but could not load a web page. Ultimately, I blamed my 5(?) year old Belkin router because the problem went away when I switched to an old DLINK router.
Second, and even more annoying, my MacBook was slow opening web pages and downloading anything from the Internet. I performed my own non-scientific speed test by trying to simultaneously load nyt.com on my MacBook and ThinkPad. The ThinkPad was all done within 3 seconds, and the MacBook took 14 seconds to finish opening loading the last image. Huge difference!
I searched and found several people with the same issue, and the same solution. Switching my DNS to OpenDNS solved the problem. Now, my MacBook loads pages almost as fast as my Windows machines…but I have no real understanding why.
