I used to leech Internet access from a neighbor, but after they gave me grief about it, I set up my own wireless network and am paying for my own Internet. Good citizen, right? Problem is, every time I start up my trusty old MacBook it automatically picks my neighbor’s network and I have to explicitly switch it to use my own. Isn’t there some way to fix this annoying wifi network behavior??
You’re right, you’ve become a good network citizen, and just in time. Cities are starting to establish laws that define leeching off another person’s wireless wifi network without permission as an illegal act of theft. How you’d get caught I don’t know, but you can imagine that from the other party’s point of view, it’d be alarming if you were, say, pirating movies and it was their computer network that was tagged!
Like many other computer systems (think Windows Vista, for example) the Mac OS X system is smart and tries to simplify your life by remembering what you’re doing and automate the process subsequently. Sometimes that’s a pain. 🙂
What happened was that you have a setting in your “Network” System Preferences that tells your computer to remember networks you’ve joined and prefer them over new ones that it hasn’t seen before. Since your neighbor’s network is now marked as a “preferred” network, well, you know the problem you’re seeing!
I actually had a similar problem in a hotel room during the Consumer Electronics Show recently, where the first night I was there I used the hotel network “Encore – Rooms – Wireless”, but then set up a wireless router so my roommate and I could share a single connection.
In the pull-down menu from the wifi icon on the menu bar, I saw this:
The shortcut to get the right spot to change or forget the preferred wireless network can be reached by choosing “Open Network Preferences…” at the bottom of that menu, which takes you here:
Don’t worry about what network it shows you as connected to at this point. You want to click on the “Advanced” button:
Now scroll down and find the network in question. It’ll be somewhere on the list:
Click on the “-” button and that wifi network is no longer on the preferred list. Also notice that right below it is the option to “Remember networks this computer has joined”: if you want to choose a network each and every time just unselect it.
Done? Just click on the red button on the top left and it’ll ask if you want to save the changes:
That’s all there is to it. Good luck, and thanks for not stealing bandwidth. 🙂
An important step left out of this!
1. You’ll likely discover, as I did, that all the network names were greyed out– indeed, all the choices were. The problem is that the padlock was LOCKED (see screenshot where Advanced is boxed in red). In what’s shown here, that’s unlocked, but typically it won’t be.
Instead, next to it, it will say “Click this lock to make changes”. You’ll need to click it and enter your password. Then, you can go ahead.
2. The second problem is that the only names I see are for our networks in own house! Yet, the Wi-Fi drop down menu from the menu bar still shows neighbors’ networks names. Those are the ones we want to delete! (Well, just one, which is offensively named.)
Any ideas how to do *that*?
In any event, thanks for the clear, screenshot supported tutorials.
You can’t delete networks that show up because your computer can see them. There’s no “mask” or “hide” function, but it’s an interesting idea, Paul. But doesn’t your system automatically connect to your own network, so why would you see your neighbor’s network anyway?
Thank you this was very helpful.
The password might be in your Keychain. Go to Applications > Utilities and launch “Keychain Access”. Verify your password to make changes, then enter the wifi access point name. That’ll get the password and you can then delete it.
Works but computer won’t forget the actual password? How?
I am no mac expert but if someone was wanting to connect to a network again (say they have permission but don’t want it default), it looks like the network could be dragged lower on the list….based on those screenshots. Is this correct?
Dave thank you for this. I had the same problem with my MacBook as my old G5 is on cable. My neighbor uses wireless too. Thanks for the explanation.