Macbook won't connect to network, but vista will?

I've tried everything I can think of and so far nothing has worked.

I'm at my parents house for the rest of the summer and as soon as I got here I wasn't able to connect my macbook to the wireless network here. My dad's laptop, running vista, has had problems with the network as well. We have a 100mbps connection here, but his laptop is getting only about 11-30mbps. It's definitely not something wrong with his computer, because its less than a year old and has 2GB ram.

The router I'm using is a Netgear RangeMax, and it says that we should be getting around 100mbps with this router. Obviously that's an exaggeration. The router isn't new, probably about a year and a half old.

I don't understand what's wrong because I was able to connect here no problem last summer. The only new addition to this household is my dad's windows laptop running vista.

Does anyone think that vista is somehow blocking my mac from accessing the internet? The macbook is picking up the full signal but when I try to load anything, it says that it can't find the server.

Any ideas would be appreciated!

Hi, have you tried shutting one of the laptops (preferably your Dad's machine) off and then reconnecting to see if this helps the situation? Has anything changed in terms of new neighbors networks, devices in the home that may interfere with your signal?

Also, have you upgraded to the latest firmware on your router?

Hi, thanks for your reply.

I hadn't tried shutting it down completely, I had only tried closing the laptop and seeing what happened -- but nothing really changed.

So I just tried shutting it down completely and my computer came online and seems to working at its regular speed. Randomly last night it connected to the internet without me doing anything--so I really have no idea what's going on.

I did check the firmware--and it said there were no new updates.

So my mac runs at its normal high speed online, but vista runs at 11mpbs? And when the vista is on the network, my computer won't even connect? Strange stuff.

I'm guessing this must be a problem with the router. I know that Netgear doesn't really support Macs as well as they support Windows, but who knows. Thanks again for your help.

Sounds like it could be a problem with the firewall that is setup on the windows machine. Has he got some Norton or McAfee firewall running? Try turning it off and see what happens.

Definitely sounds like a router issue, and if there are no new firmware updates for your router and NetGear hasn't offered any solution, you may want to look at getting a new, cheap router.

Are you both using the same connection type (ie B, G, N)? What does the router support?

As a test, can you try shutting your Dad's wireless off, plugging his computer into a physical port and using yours via wireless? If this works fine then we can pretty much conclude it's with the wireless connection itself, not the simple fact of having your computer and his computer on the network at the same time.