WiFi and Vista – Problems with basic hookup

My mistake. I told someone that hooking up a Vista Laptop to their WiFi should be a piece of cake. “It’ll prompt you for the key”, I told her.

A home user from one of my clients bought her daughter a laptop for graduation. I gave her the basic buying guide recommendations and she adjusted to fit her budget. She ended up with a Gateway that doesn’t seem too bad.

The Gateway Laptop has a Realtec wireless adapter. I don’t know if that’s the problem or not. I normally buy Dell laptops and pay $15 extra for the Intel wireless adapter.

This old Dell TruMobile WiFi Router doesn’t support WPA, of course, let alone WPA2. So I tried WEP. Then I tried no security. Either way the laptop would connect, but not pick up a network address via DHCP. Ok, I’ll assign a static address. That didn’t work either.

A visit to Google let me know that this isn’t the first time people have found that:

• Vista is harder, not easier to connect to WiFi than XP
• Vista may not like your WiFi router
• Vista can be a pain in the tail; requiring approval or elevated privileges to do basic stuff, and everything is impossible to find – not intuitive at all – for people accustomed to working with XP all day

BTW, my three year old XP laptop connected up right away. And the Vista laptop connected just fine with a cable. Then, of course, IE 7 worked about 25% of the time on the few sites I tried – so I headed over to mozilla.com; downloaded and installed Firefox and guess what? No more internet problems, at least with the cable.

So I’m going to pickup a newer router and try again.

What a pain. I’ve been advising people against upgrading old hardware to Vista, but new hardware from Gateway? Should be a slam dunk. Instead, it could drive a man to drink.

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