My home wifi network has worked almost flawlessly for ten years or more. I’ve a BT home hub…a couple of generations old now, wifi switched off and an Apple AirPort Extreme router (which I bought many years ago sencond hand off Ebay) with an Apple Airport Express extender. I moved to this set as the BT router kept on dropping out and the Airport router was the only one at the time with dual band. All been fine all these years, but recently on the iMac (all OK on tablets and smartphones) I get an issue where the iMac will work perfectly fine for a few minutes or so after turning on, then will cease to load up new page…so I’ll navigate to another site and the progress bar will load to about 25% then freeze and hang. The machine hasn’t crashed or anything and still works so definitely an internet/wifi thing. Also same thing happens even if I don’t navigate away from a website..it just ceases to function. But all is fine on smart devices and tablets.

After a bit of Google-foo’ing and trial and error the only thing that seems to get it working again are the following steps:-
1. close down safari
2. go to ‘Network’ in ‘Systems Preferences’
3. Go to the Proxies tab and untick the SOCKS proxy box
4. Go to the DCHP tab and renew the DCHP licence and apply
5. re-open Safari and all is well again until I next turn off and boot up again.

Though a combination of my google-foo’ing and trial and error stumbled across the above process which works 100%, I’ve struggled to find out why it works and what’s ‘wrong’ and what I need to do to fix it.

Part of me thinks maybe the Apple Airport setup is now way past its best and since Apple no longer make Wifi routers or support the ones they’ve made I’ve just pressed the button on an new Mesh setup, so I’ll look forward to seeing if that helps, but even if it does I’ll still be interested in understanding more about what I’m actually doing when I carry out the steps above and why it works and what I need to do to do a proper fix (assuming it isn’t as simple as the old Apple routers).

Thanks.

I used to run a similar airport Extreme system (X 2 plus an express) system and got fed up with the airports needing a lot of attention.
Changed to a Google WiFi mesh system and never looked back.
Not cheap but works very well.

Bin the Apple gear.
(Other mesh systems are available)

Does the iMac have the same issue when connected via a cable?

You could try manually assigning an IP address. That could avoid problems with DHCP. Just make sure it is in the right range, and not the same as any other devices on the network.

An update for Apple wi-fi gear was released recently, go to the Apple Support Downloads page and see if it can be applied to your kit.

thanks for suggestions. Not tried using a cable…the router is in a completely different room so not easy. The Apple gear is unto date as far as firmware and software updates are concerned. They’ve always auto updated so not been any bother whatsoever and never had to manually update the kit. I’m not sure I can remember how to get into the router settings it’s been so long I’ve had to go into them but via the Airport Utility app I can tell when updates have been done.

The Mesh setup should arrive today…if it works then I guess I’ll never know apart from putting it down to the old Apple kit, but if I get the same issue then I guess I’ll have to keep investigating…I’d try a hard cable first, then maybe a different browser…could be a Safari thing.

My airport express thingy always used to auto update too. Not with this latest firmware update though. Different updates for different vintage airports, although it does seem to automatically assign the correct update. Strangely, this update wouldn’t download and install automatically and even standing beside it with words of encouragement and clicking took a number of attempts to get the green light back from flashing amber.

I’ve had similar WiFi dropping out at random times too, except the router that does this is a TP Link. Reboot router seems to cure it.

Why on Earth is it setting a proxy in the first place?

I know viruses are unusual on Mac but a malware sweep would be my first port of call here.

I’d be giving the iMac a hard stare at this point rather than the Airports. You could investigate what band the iMac is using and compare with the other widgets to see if it specific to a band. It could be that someone nearby has a new access point using the same channel causing interference, not sure why that would be cured by the dhcp renew but it could be the iMac mucking around with its bands and channels.

Will be interesting to see if new mesh fixes it.