G
Guest
Alright, so we know Vista is all cool and stuff, with a shiny interface and a
ton of features and mysterious pathways of configuration that can befuddle
even the most adept computer operator or designer, but there has been one
problem that has annoyed me persistently since I got my new laptop: Wireless
connectivity.
Alright, maybe its more than just one problem, its a ton of problems all in
one package. It's like one of those strange TV advertisements that offers
something relatively useless, and then adds "But wait, there's more!" to an
extent that you wonder what the marketing people of these free products were
thinking.
Anyway, off of my rambling, the first problem I have with wireless has to do
with standby / hibernate. How come everyone and their old grandmother who has
vista and laptops and stuff get wireless connectivity issues if they standby
and come out of it? For instance, I go to school and frequently standby my
laptop when moving between classes and hotzones. If I close my laptop to
suspend it, and come back to it, I'd expect wireless to be working, but its
not. For some odd reason, windows seems to disregard the connectivity of the
wireless network you are near, but will very happily show you the signal
strength to said unconnectable points. What do I have to do to get my laptop
to reconnect? Reboot it? Restart the adapter? The price tag for Vista over XP
suggests something better to come of the system, and this seems like such a
widespread bug that I'd expect nothing less than Microsoft giving another KB
article to this problem and a lovely patch, if they haven't already.
The second problem I have, and this is by far the worst, is automatic
connections to wireless access points. Remember way back to Windows XP, where
you had the option to "Automatically connect to non-preferred networks"?
Yeah, what happened to that? Honestly, if I'm hopping hotspots a lot, I
really don't want to create a million profiles for every access point I need
to connect to, in fact I don't even care which one Windows connects me to. I
just want an access point that will give me internet.
Security the people say? I say the internet's not secure as it is, and if I
want some kind of mediocre security, I'll use Hamachi or another VPN over
internet solution to encrypt my traffic.
What happened to the days when you could go on the bus with a nice cup of
coffee, driving through metro downdown and just surf the web? Did access
point owners complain that people were connecting to their unprotected access
points and stealing their bandwidth or something? I would really enjoy the
ability to just have Windows connect to whatever it sees. I don't really care
what it finds, just connect to it!
In short of this rant, there's two specific features that I particularly
find to be very important, and those are 1) automatic reconnection to access
points after standby/hibernate, and 2) automatically connect to non-preferred
networks. The Vista pricetag is expensive enough, and I have to give credit
to Microsoft for actually putting some effort forth into making a good OS
thats stable, but fix the bugs, and sometimes the tradeoff between security
and user-features really needs to favor the user... I don't like being
controlled by my machine, I like telling my machine what to do instead.
ton of features and mysterious pathways of configuration that can befuddle
even the most adept computer operator or designer, but there has been one
problem that has annoyed me persistently since I got my new laptop: Wireless
connectivity.
Alright, maybe its more than just one problem, its a ton of problems all in
one package. It's like one of those strange TV advertisements that offers
something relatively useless, and then adds "But wait, there's more!" to an
extent that you wonder what the marketing people of these free products were
thinking.
Anyway, off of my rambling, the first problem I have with wireless has to do
with standby / hibernate. How come everyone and their old grandmother who has
vista and laptops and stuff get wireless connectivity issues if they standby
and come out of it? For instance, I go to school and frequently standby my
laptop when moving between classes and hotzones. If I close my laptop to
suspend it, and come back to it, I'd expect wireless to be working, but its
not. For some odd reason, windows seems to disregard the connectivity of the
wireless network you are near, but will very happily show you the signal
strength to said unconnectable points. What do I have to do to get my laptop
to reconnect? Reboot it? Restart the adapter? The price tag for Vista over XP
suggests something better to come of the system, and this seems like such a
widespread bug that I'd expect nothing less than Microsoft giving another KB
article to this problem and a lovely patch, if they haven't already.
The second problem I have, and this is by far the worst, is automatic
connections to wireless access points. Remember way back to Windows XP, where
you had the option to "Automatically connect to non-preferred networks"?
Yeah, what happened to that? Honestly, if I'm hopping hotspots a lot, I
really don't want to create a million profiles for every access point I need
to connect to, in fact I don't even care which one Windows connects me to. I
just want an access point that will give me internet.
Security the people say? I say the internet's not secure as it is, and if I
want some kind of mediocre security, I'll use Hamachi or another VPN over
internet solution to encrypt my traffic.
What happened to the days when you could go on the bus with a nice cup of
coffee, driving through metro downdown and just surf the web? Did access
point owners complain that people were connecting to their unprotected access
points and stealing their bandwidth or something? I would really enjoy the
ability to just have Windows connect to whatever it sees. I don't really care
what it finds, just connect to it!
In short of this rant, there's two specific features that I particularly
find to be very important, and those are 1) automatic reconnection to access
points after standby/hibernate, and 2) automatically connect to non-preferred
networks. The Vista pricetag is expensive enough, and I have to give credit
to Microsoft for actually putting some effort forth into making a good OS
thats stable, but fix the bugs, and sometimes the tradeoff between security
and user-features really needs to favor the user... I don't like being
controlled by my machine, I like telling my machine what to do instead.