Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Yosemite Edition

WiFi Connections

Your Mac can communicate with a wireless base station up to 300 feet away, much like a cordless phone. Doing so lets you surf the Web from your laptop in a hotel room, for example, or share files with someone across the building from you.

Chapter 16 has much more information about setting up a WiFi network. The real fun begins, however, when it comes time to join one.

Sometimes you just want to join a friend’s WiFi network. Sometimes you’ve got time to kill in an airport, and it’s worth a $7 splurge for half an hour. And sometimes, at some street corners in big cities, WiFi signals bleeding out of apartment buildings might give you a choice of several free hotspots to join.

POWER USERS’ CLINIC: PPPoE and DSL

If you have DSL service, you may be directed to create a PPPoE service. (You do that on the Network pane of System Preferences; click the button, choose PPPoE, select the connection you’re using to PPPoE, and then click Create.)

It stands for PPP over Ethernet, meaning that although your DSL “modem” is connected to your Ethernet port, you still have to make and break your Internet connections manually, as though you had a dial-up modem.

Fill in the PPPoE dialog box as directed by your ISP (usually just your account name and password). From here on in, you start and end your Internet connections exactly as though you had a dial-up modem.

Your Mac joins WiFi hotspots ...