Several years ago, Xfinity unilaterally decided to turn each home customer’s Xfinity router into a Wi-Fi Hot Spot. Many people were understandably less than excited to have their home router become an open Wi-Fi Hotspot, accessible to anyone even if Xfinity promised that no one could get into each user’s personal network.

On the other side of this, one problem that can arise is that your device (iPhone, iPad, Mac) can inadvertently join one of these insecure networks when what you really want is to join a secure network.

Because Apple gear will attempt to connect to open networks before closed ones, if a Xfinity Wi-Fi Hot Spot is nearby you might find yourself on that instead of the encrypted network you intended to join. You may not even realize you are connected to an unfamiliar network until you’ve already done a fair amount of work.

Thankfully, you can avoid this on a Mac by checking the network that you are connected to once you open your computer. If you’ve accidentally joined one of these networks, here’s what you do on a Mac:

Go to System Preferences > Network. Select Wi-Fi from the list on the left then click Advanced… (located in the lower right corner). Under the Wi-Fi tab, look at the list of Preferred Networks. Once you spot the Xfinity network, drag that network down to the bottom of the list.

This will instruct your Mac to connect to xFinity last and therefore hopefully connect to your preferred network first. Don’t delete the xFinity network, or else it will appear as the preferred network the next time you open up your device.

As a rule, our advice is usually to wait on upgrading your operating system with new releases. This is because Apple sets a ship date and off it goes, even if the internal developers aren’t quite finished. Even as the new OS is being downloaded, Apple is working feverishly on the “.1” bug-fix update—an update that typically ships a couple weeks after launch. Some 6-8 weeks later, we usually see the “.2″ revision to the operating system which patches the first wave of bugs reported by the initial downloaders. And then another. In time, you get a really nice, stable system.

Many people successfully upgrade soon after an operating system is released. For others, however, an operating system upgrade breaks either some function or third-party software that they rely upon, and there’s no way to fix it because the patches aren’t yet available. We believe that it’s better to let someone else test things out while you continue using a well-tested, reliable older version.

When it comes to upgrades, we’re happy to help if you want help, training, or troubleshooting. If you’re in the Sentinel program, there’s even a discount for our time. Just call or email to schedule an appointment.

If your Mac is slowing down, it’s important to ask why. Is the hard drive starting to fail? Not enough memory? To keep your machine running at optimum levels. you need to know what’s causing problems and solve them. We can help.
At MacAtoZ, our Sentinel diagnostic service that performs 150 different hourly checks to monitor the health of your machine. Sentinel checks common problem areas like storage space, hard drive health, and memory while maintaining your privacy (it does not and cannot see your personal data). We recommend Sentinel to help keep your machine healthy. If you want more speed and less spinning beach ball, click to learn more about how Sentinel can help.