Posts Tagged “Vista”

Windows Vista Still Plaguing My Life

by Nick.

Today I installed dd-wrt on my new Linksys E2000 router because of some connectivity issues I was having. Dd-wrt works great and fixed the problem I was having, but an old problem I was having with Windows Vista surfaced again. My parents desktop connects via a wireless adapter and after I updated my router the their desktop would hang on “Identifying Network…”

After eliminating the router as the problem by connecting with two other laptops and my Android phone I decided the problem was Windows Vista. DD-WRT allows you to create virtual wireless devices so I created a Vista only network with no encryption.

Tried to connect and Vista worked fine, identified the network in seconds and asked me to identify the computers location as normal. So I disconnected trued WEP, same thing. Disconnected again and tried WPA worked fine. Then I tried WPA2 and it hung up on “Identifying Network…”

So I dialed it back to just WPA which is decent security but not great, and for some reason that makes the Vista machine happy. I searched all over the net for this problem for ages and never saw this “solution,” if you can calling having to lower your security to accommodate a shitty OS a solution.

In short it seems Vista can not connect properly to WPA2 networks, and if you use WPA you should be ok. Amazing how bad this is, and it galls me to think I have to buy Windows 7 to fix this properly. I think I might just buy them a iMac and get it over with.

Windows Vista 64 Bit: A Sad Tell of Woe

by Nick.

When Vista first came out I jumped on-board and decided to give it a try. I bought the Ultimate edition just because it sounded the best, and installed it. After fighting the OS to make it do what it is meant to do out of the box, I decided to go back to XP. I put the problems down to early bugs.

Six month later Vista SP1 is released and I decided to really give vista a try a second time. The install went a bit easier because I remembered most of the tricks I had used before. This time however I was in for the long haul and was determined to make things work the best I could. This decision ended up causing me a lot of headaches.

I am going to go over some of the issues I encountered when getting this to work, some are small and others are show stoppers.