Wifi still disconnecting after Airport card replacement
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I purchased a new Airport card for an A1261 Macbook Pro off this site.
The previous card would shut itself off usually within a minute of booting, and then would get stuck in ‘Off’. Turn WiFi On would do nothing. The only thing that worked reliably was to set the WiFi service to Inactive, then remove it, then restart and set up a new WiFi service. Doing this would turn the WiFi back on temporarily, it would connect to a network and get an IP address and appear to be working. Sometimes it was possible to browse the internet for a minute or two but inevitably it would shut back off.
Fast forward to installing the new card - it seems to be a little more responsive than the previous one, but still having similar issues. Now it will turn on and work for a short time before dropping networks, but no longer turning Off. It’s possible to toggle the card Off and On which the old card wouldn’t do. However, it won’t reconnect without restarting the machine. In the System Profiler, the status of the WiFi card is listed as ‘Not Associated’ when this happens. Not too sure what that means. It will sometimes still list available networks, but trying to connect with any of them gives a ‘Connection Timeout’ error.
Other things tried are resetting the PRAM, SMC, deleting all airport and network .plist files. Similar behavior happens in Recovery mode.
The machine is still running the latest version of Lion - might try updating to the latest OS it will support and seeing if that does anything. Lion is freshly installed though since I just installed a new SSD. The WiFi problem existed prior to that.
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MacBook Pro 17" Models A1151 A1212 A1229 and A1261