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Choose your preferred Wi-Fi network
The number of wireless networks is growing rapidly and many people have them at home for the convenience of not having to run networking cables around the house in order to get one or more computers on the internet. Businesses use them, airports have them, hotels have them and stores and coffee shops in the high street have them.
The chances are that if you use Wi-Fi then there will be two or more wireless networks within reach of your computer. Which should it connect to? If you are using your computer at home then obviously you want to connect to your own wireless network and not your next door neighbours, but even if you use a laptop in a public place, you might have a preference. So how do you choose which network to connect to?
You can view a list of available wireless networks by clicking the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar. Each time you access it, it scans for networks and adds their names to the menu. Then you can select the one that you want to connect to. (Of course, networks can be locked to keep them private, so you can't connect to everything you see.) The signal strength of wireless networks sometimes varies and you might access the menu when it is temporarily low for the one you want to access and it might not appear on the menu. Wait a second and then access the menu again to refresh the list.
If you don't have a Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar then you need to tell OS X to display it. Click the Apple menu in the top left corner and select System Preferences. Click the Network icon in the Internet & Network section and tick the box labelled Show AirPort status in menu bar.
When several networks are available, which one should your computer connect to? Click the Advanced button and select the AirPort tab. You will see a list of all the wireless networks that you have ever joined.
The order of the networks in the list is important and the computer will try each one in turn. So if you can see your and your neighbours networks, click and drag your network to the top of the list and the Mac will try to connect to it first. You are then much less likely to accidentally connect to your neighbours. You can order the other networks by clicking and dragging them too, so if you use Starbucks Wi-Fi, then drag it up the list so it's tried before any others that might be available.
