September 10, 2005
WiFi woes
My sister has a PC running Windows XP Home (you know where this is headed already, don't you?). I set her up with a wireless network a year or two ago, when she had broadband installed. I used the same hardware that I bought for my parents - a trusty wireless router and 4-port hub, and a USB wireless adapter. A week or two back, she turned the PC off, dismantled it, moved it to a different room, put it back together, turned it on and found the wireless network had become a wireless notwork.
So today I did the usual reinstall drivers game, but was completely unable to make the thing work. It simply couldn't see any wireless networks at all. I grabbed the latest drivers for the hardware version, burnt them to CD and tried them, and nothing. In the end, I managed to get the machine to see the network by hard-coding the ESSID, WEP key and channel in the advanced options tab of the device driver, but it was still wonky (it didn't think it was attached to a network and it couldn't see any wireless networks, but was connected).
I did the mandatory tech support live chat with someone ironically called Dante, who told me to do all the obvious things (sacrifice a goat, stand on my head, find a vestal virgin, etc), none of which helped. In the end, out of frustration, he said "go download all the drivers from our FTP site, and try each of them in turn and see if they work". I did this, and after installing the v2.6 drivers on the v2.3 hardware, everything was back to normal. Hurrah. Score 1 for the gardeners.
First thing I did with a working network was run Windows Update, which meant going through the Windows Genuine Advantage update. For those not in the know, it's a charming procedure where Microsoft now needs to check your license before allowing you to get the required bugfixes and security patches for their shoddy software.
It told me:
To get updates, you must first validate your Windows software. Validation ensures that you are using an authentic and fully licensed copy of Windows.
Or, to paraphrase:
You are probably a criminal, so we want to make you jump through hoops to prove who you are.
Now surely there are more genuine users than illegal users of Windows, so having this message there is insulting the masses of loyal customers? The mind boggles.
So, this morning's unanswered questions:
- How can Windows simply forget how to deal with the wireless network?
- How can a vendor write drivers that don't work for the hardware they developed, requiring you to use the wrong drivers?