Real Kato Blog: Vista? Still Sucks.

You can put lipstick on a pig...

So Windows Vista is supposed to be soooo much better than Windows XP. You'd think that's a pretty low bar to hurdle.

I had the pleasure this evening of trying to set up wireless networking in Vista. In typical Windows fashion, there's a lovely wizard to walk you through the process. And also in typical Windows fashion, nothing works once the wizard is done.

So you go back to opening up control panels and properties windows. But, where exactly is the one setting you have to change? There were at least eight different windows that contained settings related to wireless network setup. Some windows contained the same information, but in different formats. Oh, and with every fourth click, Vista had to stop and ask me if it was okay to continue.

I went through all the different windows, and even went to the command line, but I still ended up with the same problem: Vista could not obtain an IP address via DHCP over its wireless connection. It could get an IP address over ethernet. A static IP address over wireless worked fine. And my MacBook was able to get an IP address over wireless. But Vista plus DHCP plus wireless equals NO INTERNETS FOR YOU.

I found a Microsoft web page that said Vista uses the DHCP broadcast flag, and some routers don't work with that. The web page had instructions for changing a couple of registry settings, so I tried that. Still no go.

I'm a pretty savvy computer user, and even though I'm a Mac guy, I can get around Windows pretty well. And still I couldn't get this thing working (except with a static IP address, which is a less-than-optimal solution). I just can't imagine an average consumer having to work this out, especially once it got to the point of tinkering in RegEdit. I can't even imagine a typical tech support person on the telephone being able to work this out.

Here's a little quiz for you, especially those of you who aren't in the computer industry... if I told you that you needed to change your network settings so that you use a manually-assigned IP address instead of getting a dynamic address over DHCP, do you think you could figure out how to change that? I'll tell you that it takes approximately the same number of steps on a Mac OS X and Windows XP or Vista, but I betcha that you'd be much more likely to stumble across the correct setting on a Mac versus Windows.

I'm not gonna say that networking is perfectly easy on a Mac, because clearly it's not. The fact that there's hundreds of different routers, each with different capabilities, isn't helping. Here's another quiz for non-computer people: define the abbreviations SSID, WEP, WPA, AES, TKIP, PSK, RIP, DHCP, DNS. If you don't know all of these terms, there's a good chance that you can't configure your wireless router correctly, and unless you got one of your geek friends to help you, your neighbors are probably now surfing for child porn over your connection.

Apple was one of the pioneers of wireless Internet. Hopefully someday, they'll find a way to make it just work.

Permalink 3 Comment

Posted by Ken in: techwatch

Comments

Comment #1 from Brett (Guest)
2007 Jun 19 - 11:08 am : #

Read the first 13 words before I realized this story would, in fact, not be about putting lipstick on a pig.

Comment #2 from Bake Town (Guest)
2007 Jun 19 - 11:53 am : #

Huh?

Comment #3 from JohnC (Guest)
2007 Jun 19 - 11:34 pm : #

yeah... I brought my iBook home, did a fresh install of El Tigre, plugged it into my DSL router (without even thinking about it I might add, I just stuck the plug in), imported my backed up music and email, resinstalled a bunch of software, and then started using it like nothing happened. And i bet $10, that this entire process took less time than what you are describing, and none of the swearing.

Mac is asking a question, cancel or allow?

Comments are closed for this post.

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