06-28-2011, 02:25 PM

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I have an ATT wireless internet card that I plug into my MBP on the train in the mornings on my way to work. There is a specific area that the train travels through that I've noticed has a low signal (from looking at the bars on my phone and the bars on the wireless cards app on the puter).

When the train travels through this area my puter locks up. I can "force quit" the wireless app but I can't do anything else on the puter. I usually have to hold down the power button and reboot.

I'm assuming this bad signal area has something to do with it. On a windows machine you can usually hit Ctrl, alt, del to kill programs and keep moving but I'm not sure how to rectify this.

thoughts?

06-28-2011, 08:39 PM

Yeah. Rebooting a frozen computer repeatedly the way you describe is not good for it. Shut it down before you reach that spot, and restart after you're clear of it.

06-29-2011, 04:37 PM

Any thoughts on how to avoid it locking up and what may be happening internally to make this happen?

06-29-2011, 08:14 PM

From your description, it's nothing internal that is causing the drop off in the signal and subsequent freeze up. It's probably the lack of transmission towers for a stretch of your route. Those are quite expensive, and not available at your local big box electronics store. You'll have to wait for the local carrier to pony up. In the meantime, you'll have to experiment to find out how soon the signal gets strong enough, perhaps by seeing where it crashes on the return trip.