Section 8.2. Wireless Networks


8.2. Wireless Networks

A broadband connection like a cable modem or DSL is heaven, but it's not the penthouse floor of heaven. These days, the ultimate bliss is connecting without wires, from anywhere in your house or buildingor, if you're a laptop warrior , someone else's house or building, like Starbucks, McDonald's, airport lounges, hotel lobbies , and anywhere else that a WiFi Internet "hot spot" has been set up.

Those are places where somebody has set up an WiFi access point (or base station), which is a glorified antenna for their cable modem or DSL box. Any computer that's been equipped with a corresponding wireless networking card (as most new laptops are these days) can hop online at high speed with only a couple of clicks.


Tip: Whenever you try to get online, Windows Vista automatically hunts for a working connectionwired or wireless. That's a blessing for laptops. When you're at the office plugged into an Ethernet cable, you get the security and speed of a wired network. When you're in some hotel-lobby hot spot, and your laptop can't find the Ethernet cable, it automatically hops onto the wireless network, if possible.(And how does the dial-up modem enter into all this? That's up to you. Open Internet Options in your Control Panel, click the Connections tab, and turn on, for example, "Dial whenever a network connection is not present" or "Never dial a connection." Keep the "Never dial" option in mind if the Connect dialup dialog box starts popping up every time your WiFi signal hiccups.)

For details on connecting to a wireless network (using a laptop in a hotel lobby, for example), see Figure 8-1.

Figure 8-1. Top: Windows Vista no longer notifies you when you've entered a WiFi hot spot. You just sort of have to know, or you can check for hot spots by choosing Start Connect To, which produces the dialog box shown here.
Middle: You can also get here by choosing "Connect to a network from the taskbar icon shown here.
Bottom: When you double-click one of the networks, you're asked to type in the password, if one is required. Then you see this: You're asked if you want Vista to memorize this network and even autoconnect to it the next time you're in rangeno muss, no dialog boxes.



Tip: In the delightful event that more than one hot spot is available at once, you can tell Windows which ones you want to connect to first. Choose Start Network; in the toolbar, click "Network and Sharing Center." From the links at left, click "Manage wireless networks to see the list of all your WiFi networks' names. Drag the networks' names up or down in the list to change their preferred connection order.



Windows Vista for Starters
Windows Vista for Starters: The Missing Manual
ISBN: 0596528264
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 175
Authors: David Pogue

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