Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Not Backwards Compatible?

New laptop running Vista as opposed to my antique desktop running XP Pro. Add in a wireless router and I find myself in the unusual position that the laptop can "see" the router, connect to it and, allegedly, the internet- and yet I can't get anything from the 'net. Pages won't load at all.

This seems to be a problem with some new TCP/IP feature in Vista designed to sell masses of new wireless routers. Now, I've heard that if I turn off the Window Scaling feature that the router-Vista problem will be fixed. Being a cautious type though I'm hesitant to do that because I can currently get online by plugging a network cable into the router- and I don't want to mess that up and end up with no way to get the laptop online.

Any suggestions?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here's an article that discusses this "feature" and has some info on how to adjust auto-tuning of TCP in Vista:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/12/15/vista-tcp-window-scaling-auto-tuning-may-slow-down-network-performance/

If it were me, I'd adjust Vista's behavior and leave the router alone (just 'cause Microsoft says something is the "right" way to do things doesn't make it so - just ask any handy Linux guru).

Anonymous said...

Sorry - that last bit should read:

vista-tcp-window-scaling
-auto-tuning-may-slow-down
-network-performance/

but without the line breaks...

Jay.Mac said...

Thanks for the link- going to try it out this evening.

Appreciate the help.