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[PsiFire]

So my sister-in-law is over today watching Psi Jr. and I promise to help her out with her laptops which she can't seem to get connected to the internet via her WRT54G linksys router.

The Dell is an easy fix, upgraded the drivers and she's off and running.

The Toshiba seems easy enough and works fine from what I can tell at my house.

I send her home with the router set to EXACTLY what my router is set at (with the exception of MAC filtering) so it should be simple plug and play.

She gets home and hooks up the router and the Dell (running XP) works great. But for some reason the Toshiba (which runs Vista mind you) can't find a wireless network. It finds two neighboring, unsecure WLANs but can't find the one I setup for her. The one I setup is set to not broadcast the SSID. But with all the settings given to Vista via manual setup of a wirelss network, it SHOULD work fine. No?

Any ideas?

My next option is to have her re-enable SSID broadcast and go from there.

[Popsikle]

Bah, my buddy (iamnobody) got rid of his linksys for this reason.  He couldnt get it to work with vista ;(

[Popsikle]

Go Microsoft!

    * “We have been looking into this problem and are working on a doc that will go into the technical details of what we have found.”
    * “Please note that some of what we are seeing is expected behavior, and some of it is not.  In certain circumstances Windows Vista will trade off network performance in order to improve multimedia playback.  This is by design.”
    * “The connection between media playback and networking is not immediately obvious.  But as you know, the drivers involved in both activities run at extremely high priority.  As a result, the network driver can cause media playback to degrade.  This shows up to the user as things like popping and crackling during audio playback.  Users generally hate this, hence the trade off.”
    * “In most cases the user does not notice the impact of this as the decrease in network performance is slight.  Of course some users, especially ones on Gigabit based networks, are seeing a much greater decrease than is expected and that is clearly a problem that we need to address.”
    * “Two other things to note.  First, we have not seen any cases where a users internet performance would be degraded, in our tests this issue only shows up with local network operations.”
    * “Second, this trade-off scheme only kicks in on the receive side.  Transmit is not affected.”

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=724

 

[PsiFire]

Seems like that would apply more to a network connection that is already established and no really seem to impact the issue at hand. Or is there something I'm missing?

[Popsikle]

Probably, but I figured it might be slightly related.  Besides we all know im not that smart!

[coldflame]

Hmph...
I have a WRT54G and never had this problem....but then again, I have XP.

[PsiFire]

Turns out Vista does not like connecting to an invisible network (ie....not broadcasting it's SSID). SO....I had to reenable the SSID broadcast and it worked fine. Stupid Microsoft. I hate showing the neighborhood the SSID. Bleh. Least it's only at the in-law's house.

[coldflame]

I love showing the neighborhood the SSID, I change it to something obnoxious, like Taliban101...
EDIT:
And it's great because I live within range of the Police Station.

[GenTsoChiken]

I love showing the neighborhood the SSID, I change it to something obnoxious, like Taliban101...
EDIT:
And it's great because I live within range of the Police Station.

dude, as funny as that is, you're an idiot

[coldflame]

You can also show the neighboorhood shared iTunes, so be like "Hey you! OUT OF MY LIBRARY"

[Flippy10x]

  SSID Broadcasting allows AirSniffing packets. And eventually cracking the WEP/WPA if the attacker is persistent enough. But it could take months on 128-bit anyway.

It doesn't surprize me, Vista is in it's early stages still. I've had some intresting disgustingly annoying errors with it as far as Printing / Networking / Email. Theres the stuck email in Outlook. That won't delete and requires a manually downloaded Hotfix, to repair. The fact that they dropped support for the All-In-One machine at my job, screwing them over big time. And this is one strike to add to the list for networking.

And Coldflame, you really don't want people snooping around your network without supervision. I've got too many sensitive files that I share among my machines, that cannot be accessed from the outside world.