In the last installment of “WTF: Snow Leopard and Wireless“, I gave up on getting it to work since I generally work with my MacBook in my office where I can just plug a cable in for net access.

I had a meeting in a local coffee shop recently and when I opened my MacBook it found the shop’s wireless and connected straight away. This got me interested in getting this to work again. It is kinda nice when I can leave the office and take the MacBook with me and work from my big comfy chair…

I did some more searching and found my provider’s troubleshooting page. I almost moved on when I read stuff like “Unplug the router and count to 10″ and “make sure the AirPort is turned ON”, but pressed on and found that the examples of the setup pages in the tutorial were very different from the setup pages that my router was showing me. A little more poking around turns up a firmware update for the router (Actiontec 701-WG).

Let me say here that I am not very fond of flashing BIOS and updating firmware. I know, I know… Its generally safe and people do it all the time but to risk bricking something that works so you can get wiz-bang new UI isn’t something I support. In this case I went ahead and downloaded the update and flashed the firmware.

It worked right off, the flashing program even remembered all the settings and replaced them after the flash.

Now, you might say that I owe Apple an apology for this but I disagree. The MacBook worked just fine with the old router firmware and failed only after installing 10.6/Snow Leopard. My iPod and Vista [spit] Notebook worked fine with the old firmware as well. The only thing that failed was the Snow Leopard AirPort connection, so I still contend that Apple was the cause of the problem, even if flashing the firmware “solved” it.

Anyway…

Now my MacBook is finally fully functional under Snow Leopard and I am happy with it. It would be nice if Apple would have been able to fix the problem, but at least there is a workaround.