[AnalBeard]

right, got a few things i need sorting out:

first off, i removed the xp partition from my machine using boot camp, then removed boot camp itself. now when i boot it up it takes a while to boot into osx, usually around 2 minutes. i'm running the middle macbook pro of the latest range so performance isn't an issue, i'm guessing an unhappy partition structure? verified the disk through disk utility and that didn't find any problems.

second - i no longer seem to be able to connect to any wireless networks. airport shows the network when you click the menu bar icon, but won't connect to it and gives the 'unable to connect' popup. now i'm not sure why, as i was able to connect to the same network just last week. i've checked network settings etc, and i have already assigned it a static ip with details i know are correct. when i try to connect the number of available networks that coconut wifi shows drops by one, and it's then not available for about 30 seconds. after about 30 seconds it reappears in the list of available networks, but i get the same problem if i try it again. the only difference i noticed is that if i go system preferences - network, it used to show the status of the airport adapter, the ethernet adapter and the firewire adapter, now it lists airport and 2 parallels connections. i don't think i made any changes to my parallels config or downloaded any updates, so i don't understand why it's changed.

*EDIT* it would appear that it is not the Mac that is causing the connection problems, but the range extender we use.

sorry if that's a lot of info, but i thought more would be better than less. i've had my mac for a little over 3 weeks now so i'm pretty good with it, but please bear in mind you might have to simplify things a little sometimes