Skip to main content

Wi-Fi under Vista

We just bought my wife a new Dell Inspiron 1525 for her business. It came with Vista Home Ultimate. This is our second computer with Vista and for the most part, I love it and haven't had any issues--except for wireless configuration.

Home
We have 802.11 pre-n at home so I configured it with all the security bells and whistles. However, oddly, I had to dumb down to WPA-Personal from WPA2-Personal to get the 802.11g laptop to connect. I'm still not sure why but WPA2 just wouldn't fly. This was also true for my Dell desktop talking 802.11g.

Public
I enjoy working at Panera from time to time: good snacks, quiet (relatively...compared to my house and work environments), and the Wi-Fi is decent (and free). My wife brought her laptop there recently and I could not for the life of me get the 1525 connected to Wi-Fi. I couldn't even get Vista to tell me what networks were available. Both my other two 802.11g laptops under XP connect just using the "View Available Wireless Networks" dialog.

Vista annoys me from a wireless standpoint because, coupled with Dell's proprietary dialog, there are at least four areas in which to configure wireless. What? With all the fancy wizards and usability, why do I need to visit three different spots?

Finally, I gave up and started trolling Google. Didn't find much there either. After bringing it home, I started from scratch: Start >> Network and boom. There it is: Network browsing and file sharing is not enabled... Hello! Where were you before? I swear it wasn't there. So, that was my issue. Enable this and the rest is downhill.



I'm all for features disabled by default for security but the help documentation should have highlighted this as one of the first steps to try in diagnosing the issue. Nope.

Well, it's probably because I'm dense but if you run into this issue, now you know. Happy [un-cabled] browsing.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Hero Write-up: Now this is Customer Service!

My best friend Scott is president/C-everything of a small northeastern Ohio manufacturing concern, KirkKey Interlock . I hadn't spoken with him for a while and wanted to see how Canton fared with the Blizzard of '08 (that's what they're calling it...not me). I say, "So what's new?" He replies that on Tuesday his primary server (which essentially runs the business) came up with lame with not one, but [a statistically improbable] *two* physical disk failures on a RAID5 hardware array. My friend attempts the fix but gives up pretty quickly after seeing some Linux nasty-grams on the boot screen. His service provider is an old college buddy who lives down in Raleigh, Cerient Technologies led by Jason Tower . Scott couldn't email out because Exchange was on the toasted server. Being creative, Scott started Treo-emailing photos of the screen. Unfortunately, Jason couldn't receive email because a storm had knocked out a lot of local hosting. [Sigh] After...

Certified or Certifiable?

As a senior technology professional, I interview a lot of candidates. I also maintain solid relationships with other folks in the community. Frequently, the topic of certifications arises: A good investment? Valuable? A clear measurement of skill? Consensus appears to draw the line related to one's seniority. If you're (for example) just out of school and looking for an instant creditability boost, by all means pursue a certification. Likely, this credential will assist you in overcoming the "junior" tag and likely land you more interviews and client roles. (Note: I'm going to use the terms senior and junior here...no offense to either. Can't think of a better one word description. I was a junior once too.) In stark contrast, the value of certifications drops off the table around the 2-3 year mark. Some in my circles even perceive certifications as a negative for the senior professional. They think, "If this guy is so solid, why is he wasting valuable...

Lab Management in Visual Studio 2010 Released

In my experience, there's a lot of animosity and poor communication between Development and QA . It's not that they don't appreciate one another so much as they never seem to stay on the same page. QA : "What's the status on defect #4874?" Dev: "Done." QA : "Done?" Dev: "Yeah, I fixed that Tuesday." QA : "Err, ok . Well where is it? I mean where can I verify it?" Dev: "No clue. I committed it Tuesday. It passed unit tests and built successfully." QA : "Alright. I'll track it down." Invariably , QA speaks with the build manager (if there is one) to find the build in which that defect was repaired. After discovering the correct build, now QA needs an environment stood up to house that build. But wait, the UAT environment is currently testing the next release. It can't be disturbed for another week. At this point, the QA person's blood pressure heads for unsafe levels and the Dice.com bro...