Windows Vista Annoyances

Wireless Networks

A broadband connection like a cable modem or DSL is heaven, but it’s not the penthouse floor of heaven. These days, the ultimate bliss is connecting without wires, from anywhere in your house or building—or, if you’re a laptop warrior, someone else’s house or building, like Starbucks, McDonald’s, airport lounges, hotel lobbies, and anywhere else that a WiFi Internet “hot spot” has been set up.

Those are places where somebody has set up an WiFi access point (or base station), which is a glorified antenna for their cable modem or DSL box. Any computer that’s been equipped with a corresponding wireless networking card (as most new laptops are these days) can hop online at high speed with only a couple of clicks.

Tip

Whenever you try to get online, Windows Vista automatically hunts for a working connection—wired or wireless. That’s a blessing for laptops. When you’re at the office plugged into an Ethernet cable, you get the security and speed of a wired network. When you’re in some hotel-lobby hot spot, and your laptop can’t find the Ethernet cable, it automatically hops onto the wireless network, if possible.

(And how does the dial-up modem enter into all this? That’s up to you. Open Internet Options in your Control Panel, click the Connections tab, and turn on, for example, “Dial whenever a network connection is not present” or “Never dial a connection.” Keep the “Never dial” option in mind if the Connect dialup dialog box starts popping up every time your WiFi signal ...