I've encountered a really bizarre problem with my MacBook: when running without the charger plugged into the computer the wifi connection gets really flaky. When the charger is plugged in the wifi works as expected.
The following terminal session pretty much describes the problem. Observe how the ms ping time increases by a factor of 100 when the charger is plugged out.
$ ping 192.168.128.1
PING 192.168.128.1 (192.168.128.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.128.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=1.581 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.128.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=1.238 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.128.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=1.110 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.128.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=1.063 ms
# Charger plugged out here ...
64 bytes from 192.168.128.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=222.886 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.128.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=142.867 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.128.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=371.396 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.128.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=293.215 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.128.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=64 time=521.359 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.128.1: icmp_seq=9 ttl=64 time=135.288 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.128.1: icmp_seq=10 ttl=64 time=363.930 ms
# Charger re-inserted out here ...
64 bytes from 192.168.128.1: icmp_seq=11 ttl=64 time=2.345 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.128.1: icmp_seq=12 ttl=64 time=1.524 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.128.1: icmp_seq=13 ttl=64 time=1.194 ms
The MacBook I'm using is has the following spec: 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, running Mac OS X 10.5.8.
Questions:
- What could be the cause?
- How would you solve it?