Well said, and it needed to be said. I'm looking forward to SP1. Perhaps SP1
will fix some of the wireless problems with Vista.

"Silverion" <Silverion@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:2CC2DA4B-3419-4CD8-9C38-41EBD6CCCDD9@microsoft.com...
> 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.