April 29th, 2008

So I am going to have to claw back some of my Vista criticism.

I plugged in my new router the other night when I got home, then replaced the cables from the old one and set it up with the installation disk.

Then, with a dread borne of past Vista experiences, I sat down and turned on my laptop computer which runs Vista.

But: before it had even finished booting it had detected the new network settings, adjusted itself, and even downloaded my email for me.

Throughput speeds were slightly higher than I demanded: >1000 KB/sec and reliable. My previous XP setup got 500 - 700 KB/sec and I was happy with that, but the new speed is almost twice as fast!

Then, a few minutes into my amazed web surfing, an addon OEM program that came practically hard-coded into Vista popped up a little window asking if I wanted to turn on IPv.6, QoS, packet optimization, and a few other things I have no clue about. I said Yes to All, and a minute later I was getting 2100-2300 KB/sec transfer across the network! My Internet speeds are 4.5 - 5.0 Mbps, where I should really only be expecting ~1 Mbps (that's all I'm paying for with my cable provider—geez, I hope none of their representatives reads this).

And the extent of my configuration was to click Yes to All once to a question about configuring automatically.

So the moral of the story seems to be: Spend extra money for the "right" hardware and Vista will work great (plus, to be fair, that "extra money" turned out to be only $55.00 after tax). I am now in the odd position of having a home network that runs faster than my work network ... and my home network is wireless!

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