Yesterday I decided to help a friend setup a secure wireless connection on her newish Compaq Presario F500 notebook. She only has it a few months, and it came with Windows Vista. I’m still running Windows XP myself (although the Mac conversion is looming, trust me), and I haven’t had much dealings with Vista. From what I had seen and heard of Microsoft’s latest OS, I wasn’t overly impressed.
Anyway, I setup the wireless connection using the WEP key I’d gotten from my friend’s Netgear router, going about it the same way I would on Windows XP. The process is almost automatic for me since I’d talked people through it literally hundreds of times as an AOL technical support agent a couple of years ago. Everything seemed to be in the same place and I did what I usually do, but the wireless just wouldn’t hook up. It was about then that my friend noted that the machine had been running a bit slower than usual lately. Fine, I’d just untick a few things that looked unnecessary in msconfig (start > run > msconfig > startup tab) and reboot. Maybe that would get the wireless working, too.
Big mistake.