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I #$%^ing HATE systems with a non-standard wireless utility

Ichinisan

Ichinisan

Lifer
It's almost always a HUGE hassle when someone calls me with a Windows XP computer and the manufacturer installed a non-standard wireless utility that hijacks control of managing wireless connections.

Almost without exception, they are absolutely horrible.

1) What compels Dell/Broadcom/Linksys/D-Link/Whoever to make their own wireless utility and hijack control from Windows WZC? Do they think they're doing it better? Somewhere around service pack 1 or 2, the Windows wireless utility was vastly superior to any non-standard utility and far more user-friendly. The only deficiency I can find is that it doesn't clearly show the channel of each network in-range.

2) Even if the non-standard utility wasn't absolutely horrible, it would still be non-standard and the user would have difficulty being guided through it.

3) How hard could it be to design a user-friendly utility for connecting to a wireless network? I'm convinced that they designed these to be as convoluted as possible.

I spoke to a user today with a Dell utility based on one from Broadcom. It had a "site monitor" tab with a list of wireless networks. There was no way to connect from that screen. Double-clicking a network just showed information that was detected without even attempting to connect or ask for a key. There was no "connect" or "associate" button. Clicking "OK" simply dismissed the entire utility.

4) Granted, the Windows XP utility is pretty stupid too...

Why does it sometimes detect the algorithm (TKIP/AES) incorrectly with some routers? Is this a driver issue?

Why can't it tell when the entered key is wrong?

Why won't it detect when the stored network settings do not match the current network settings? When it does detect a mis-match (Win7), why can't it REPLACE the stored settings? Why do I need to guide a user to "Manage Wireless Networks" to remove the stored settings if Windows is already aware that the stored settings are incorrect? Even when you're in the Network and Sharing Center, it can be extremely difficult to get users to look at the LEFT SIDE and read the options to find "Manage Wireless Networks."

...but the standard utility is always 100% better than a non-standard one.

This rant is about convoluted BS non-standard wireless utilities like this one.
 
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What compels them, stupid customers. The same shit that compels my comapny to install software that takes windows error messages and translate them to comcast error messages, becasue someone convinced them its saving them money.
 
wirednuts said:
they made those utilities because xp's was so terrible. win7 fixed it, but the utilities are still around...
Click to expand...

You're confused. Yes, the Win7 utility is far superior to the WinXP utility. However, the utility in WinXP is far far FAR superior to these non-standard utilities. WinXP's wireless utility was only awful before SP1 (maybe 2, I'm not 100% sure when it changed).
 
Cabletek said:
What compels them, stupid customers. The same shit that compels my comapny to install software that takes windows error messages and translate them to comcast error messages, becasue someone convinced them its saving them money.
Click to expand...

I don't know how a convoluted and unintuitive utility can help "stupid" customers...or anyone else.
 
I dunno... I have seen a few of those wireless utilities that were not only not bad to use, they also enabled features like adhoc networking.
 
There are many protocols the native windows supplicant doesn't support. The card manufacturer one normally supports them all.

Intel ProSet comes to mind. ProSet is leaps and bounds ahead of the windows XP supplicant and has a ton of incredible features that are must haves to enterprises.

The biggest one that comes to mind is disabling the wireless card when they are plugged in.
 
spidey07 said:
There are many protocols the native windows supplicant doesn't support. The card manufacturer one normally supports them all.

Intel ProSet comes to mind. ProSet is leaps and bounds ahead of the windows XP supplicant and has a ton of incredible features that are must haves to enterprises.

The biggest one that comes to mind is disabling the wireless card when they are plugged in.
Click to expand...
The radio toggle can be independent of wireless connection management...and usually is with XP implementations.
 
Ichinisan said:
The radio toggle can be independent of wireless connection management...and usually is with XP implementations.
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You're totally missing spidey's point. In an enterprise that uses a lot of laptops, they don't want the laptop's using wifi when they'r plugged in or docked, they want the wifi disabled so it uses the ethernet, then when the laptop is unplugged, it switches back to wifi. Again, difference in enterprise. Intel's wifi manager is IMO vastly superior to any other one, especially in the enterprise features.
 
Bingo. You don't want 50 clients on every single ap because people are plugged in and won't disable their card. Even if the client isn't doing anything there are still management frames using precious bandwidth. I've had many customers run into this.

It slows the entire wireless to a crawl. It's a very real and very huge problem. Thankfully newer laptops have this feature in bios.

Plus the supplicant protocol support and overall feature it gets you are far superior.
 
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kevnich2 said:
You're totally missing spidey's point. In an enterprise that uses a lot of laptops, they don't want the laptop's using wifi when they'r plugged in or docked, they want the wifi disabled so it uses the ethernet, then when the laptop is unplugged, it switches back to wifi. Again, difference in enterprise. Intel's wifi manager is IMO vastly superior to any other one, especially in the enterprise features.
Click to expand...

I got what he was saying. There's no reason it can't disable wifi when it senses link on the wired LAN connection. I believe this feature still works perfectly even after you enable WZC in the Intel ProSet utility.
 
Ichinisan said:
I got what he was saying. There's no reason it can't disable wifi when it senses link on the wired LAN connection. I believe this feature still works perfectly even after you enable WZC in the Intel ProSet utility.
Click to expand...

How you going to enforce this so that it's mandatory on thousands of machines?
 
spidey07 said:
How you going to enforce this so that it's mandatory on thousands of machines?
Click to expand...

Doesn't the feature work the same way when WZC is enabled in ProSet settings? All ProSet needs to do is disable the radio (transparent to WZC) the same way it already does. That feature can work the same way and with the same utility, but they better have a sensible UI if they are going to hijack control of establishing connections by default.
 
Ichinisan said:
Doesn't the feature work the same way when WZC is enabled in ProSet settings? All ProSet needs to do is disable the radio (transparent to WZC) the same way it already does. That feature can work the same way and with the same utility, but they better have a sensible UI if they are going to hijack control of establishing connections by default.
Click to expand...

Pick one or the other. Connection utility or WZC. You can't have it both ways without being major headache.

Look, I want to get rid of ProSet but I can't because of it's features and excellant supplicant. Only windows 7 brings an "acceptible" supplicant, barely.
 
spidey07 said:
Pick one or the other. Connection utility or WZC. You can't have it both ways without being major headache.

Look, I want to get rid of ProSet but I can't because of it's features and excellant supplicant. Only windows 7 brings an "acceptible" supplicant, barely.
Click to expand...

Missing the point. There's no reason that feature should make you choose between one or the other. I think ProSet actually has the option to enable WZC, and the automatic wifi disable feature still works fine according to your preference.

If not, then that's the fault of idiot software engineers and that's the same thing I'm comaining about.
 
I updated the drivers on my notebook and installed Intel ProSet several months ago and it has been nothing but trouble. I swear I've told it to stop automatically connecting to a certain network a hundred times and it just keeps doing it. I've even completely deleted it from the list of recognized networks and it STILL does it (and re-adds it). On top of that, everything is mis-names and mis-categorized and mis-labeled. Even if it does do more for IT, screw Intel. They need to get ProSET right.

Also, screw Dell/Alienware's WiFi toggle software. When I toggle with Fn + F3 on my M11x r3, I get a dialog that required me to uncheck "WiFi' with my MOUSE and then CLICK "OK." I know perfectly well how to navigate dialogs with the mouse. The problem is that it appears over everything but does not take focus even though it appears to have it. It has no title bar and Alt + Tab just leave the window you have open. If I had to use my mouse, then it may as well have been a tray utility. It should toggle JUST WiFi and leave Bluetooth toggling to a tray utility, like my M11x R1 does and like this does when Windows and the utility aren't loaded.
 
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Ichinisan said:
Is there some mandate that says the UI must be convoluted and unusable in order to implement EAP chaining?
Click to expand...

No. But enterprise deployments require this feature. It's fairly new with the whole BYOD thing.

Understand the ui doesnt matter. XP cannot and does not support current requirements.

It's over 10 years old!
 
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