08-08-2011, 04:13 PM

Help Please! My husband and I have two iMacs and a PC on a home network routed thorugh a one-year-old (more or less) Cisco 'Valet' router. My iMac is a 2007, his is a model from last year. Everything was fine until he installed Snow Leopard 10.6.3 on his computer over the weekend. Suddenly my iMac, which is operating on OS x 10.4.11, started having huge connection problems. My computer tells me I'm not connected to the web, that I have no PPoe address, etc. It keeps asking me for passwords. Then I get online for a while. Alas though we work on computers, neither my husband nor I are professionaly tech people. So, we mess around a lot with IP addresses, going from ethernet to Airport connections, etc. It's all totally random and the upshot is that after 48 hours of this my computer is sometimes online, sometimes not. It is NOT a Comcast problem since my PC (also routed thorugh the Cisco) is fine. Naturally I've reset the modem a million times. I've looked in some chat rooms and it appears that when Snow Leopard first came out lots of users were having connectivtiy and networking problems. I'm about to have my husband simply take Snow Leopard off his computer and see if that will give me back my connectivity. BUT, is there any other (relatively) simple solution? My husband immediately decided something had given out on my computer, but it's obvious to me that this is no conincidence. The Snow Leopard on his computer has caused our router to not recognize me all the time, or something like that. (Weirdly, I'm also now having trouble getting my computer to go to sleep -- it seems to be working very hard on something, probably trying to get me online.) I'd appreciate any suggestions, even if it's simply to un-install Snow Leopard. Many thanks.

08-08-2011, 07:56 PM

Note: Merged/deleted duplicate threads and moved to appropriate forum.

Installing Snow Leopard on one computer would not cause one out of multiple computers in the house to have network connection issues. The first thing he should do is upgrade to 10.6.8 - here.

If he bought the Family pack of Snow Leopard, I'd suggest he upgrade your iMac next.

I would "assume" you've also already tried shutting down his machine and running yours and you still have the issue. No way his computer while asleep or shut down could be preventing your Mac from connecting to the network.

How is your iMac connecting - ethernet or wireless? Does it have the issue while connected via ethernet or only via wifi?

Open up Activity Monitor (in Applications / Utilities) to see what may be running on your machine.