I just got a nice new macbook, solid state drive and quad core (I guess), a very pretty screen and much lighter than my last one. It’s really fast! But it has had a huge problem since I got it – the wi-fi is hell slow. My 12Mbps connection dropped to 0.6 Mbps when I used my new macbook on it, and I could confirm this was the macbook’s problem: I used the old one at the same time and it didn’t slow down (the old one does not have a Mavericks update).

I guess it could be a hardware problem, but I searched on a lot of forums and found that lots of people have the same problem, and a related problem of wi-fi dropping out every couple of minutes, and it’s definitely Mavericks: many people have reported this problem after updating. It appears that this problem has been around for 3-5 months and hasn’t been fixed.

Well, this morning I stumbled by accident on a solution on my macbook: turn off the bluetooth wireless mouse. This happened because I was comparing wireless speeds on my old and new macbook, and my wireless mouse and keyboard were attached to my old one. My new one was running at 12Mbps downloads so I decided to switch off the old one and use only the new one. I duly disconnected the wireless mouse and keyboard from the old one and connected them to the new one, and suddenly it was running slowly. So then I did tests, and identified that the new laptop works fine with neither mouse nor keyboard attached; that it works fine with just keyboard; and that the speed drops to 5% of previous levels with the mouse attached.

So, if you are having this problem, try this first: disconnect your bluetooth mouse. If that doesn’t work, try disconnecting all devices. If that doesn’t work, then I guess there must be more than one cause for this problem. But for me at least it is specifically the fault of my bluetooth mouse and nothing else. Now my new computer works like a dream, and I’m enjoying the speediest computer experience ever. Solid state drives for the win!