Vista upgrade revisited

The good, the bad, and the ugly

Now, these three precautions are highly recommended for all wireless access points, and the approach will be in general use all over the place. But Vista deals with SSID broadcasts in a different way than Windows XP used to. Some access point kit does not deal with Vista in the way that Vista would like, and so the problems start. The problem manifests itself as Vista either not identifying the access point at all, identifying it as an "unnamed network", or refusing to renew the DHCP lease from the access point.

It can also be that it does not identify the access point for a short or long period of time, and then suddenly decides that it does like it, and so connects. However, you have no idea which of these will manifest itself when bringing the laptop out of sleep. I use the sleep function a lot. I might be part way through a piece of work and suddenly remember that I'm meant to be elsewhere in a very short period of time. Closing the lid on the laptop means that everything is kept as it was, and I can start back on it all just by opening the lid and authenticating myself. Except this isn't the case any longer.

I open the lid, authenticate, watch my dear little Gadget get all excited in telling me how Vista is churning away in getting back to where it was...and then sit there. Around one in 10 attempts I will connect to the network straight away. About three in 10 I will be able to force a connection after a few retries. The rest of the time, I have to decide whether it is going to be more time effective to reboot the laptop and so force an association with the access point, or to fiddle in the hope that I can get something to happen.

Fiddling is not as easy under Vista as it used to be under Windows XP. Yes, you can reset the adaptor, but it's a bit arcane in how you do it, and you get no feedback as to what is happening or at what stage things go wrong. That each time it asks you whether you really want to do this (see above) is mightily frustrating. And even if you then plug in a cable, the way that gaining an IP address through DHCP seems to be impossible just makes my day.

To reboot, I then have to save everything, and remember what I had open before I reboot. So, a resume from sleep, which should only be a matter of seconds, can, on a bad day, result in up to 20 minutes of frustration and lack of work.

It seems Microsoft is aware of these problems, as there are a couple of entries in the knowledge base. However, the fixes seem to involve messing around with the Registry, and hoping for the best. Or, turn off IPv6, and this might solve it. Or, you can turn SSID broadcast back on, and this might do it. That this is a security issue does not seem to matter to our friends at Redmond. That any of these might not fix the problem at all is a risk to take.

Microsoft seems to want to blame the access point manufacturers, but they all acted correctly when they created the access points. That Vista seems to deal with SSID broadcasting in a different way should not require all access point vendors to update their old hardware.

A quick search of the forums shows that such connectivity problems are common, which for an operating system developed for the mobile era shows a major lack of pre-testing in this area. Microsoft tells me that SP1 will address issues with networking, but it looks like we will all have to wait in the meantime.

All told, I like Vista, but it is small items like these which make you want to scrub it off and start back with XP. Come on Microsoft. It shouldn't be too difficult to get rid of problems like this.

Copyright © 2007, Quocirca