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Workarounds for Vista's Networking Problems?

Posted by Cliff on from the you-might-not-wanna-upgrade-just-yet dept.

tridium asks: "I recently moved into a new place where the landlord left a Linksys WRT54G v2 router for us to use. The three laptops in the house running XP connected to it fine, but my desktop, running Vista RC1 build 5600, had to be hardwired. The Internet worked fine for a bit, but I noticed some websites weren't loading up (Google, Gmail, and several others), and IM clients weren't working. Vista's self-diagnosis said it couldn't communicate with the DNS server, so I researched and it seems the new TCP stack in Vista is wreaking havoc with my router. I upgraded the firmware from Linksys, tried manually setting IP settings, modified the registry to disable TCP window stacking, but nothing helped. Linksys support was also useless in fixing the problem. I'm at a loss and any help, short of downgrading to XP, would be greatly appreciated." Other people have experienced problems getting Vista to work with off-the-shelf routers. A thread from September identifies the new window scaling feature as a potential culprit, while another article says that Vista and SPI-enabled routers don't play well together. Whether the problem is related is unknown, but another thread offers some troubleshooting tips for anyone else who may be experiencing this problem. Has anyone figured out how to disable (or at least work around) some of the more troubling aspects of Vista's new TCP 'features'?

7 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. Use teh Linux next time! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    pwnd!

  2. Hmmmm tough question here on slash by LiquidCoooled · · Score: -1, Troll

    Link to ubuntu or gentoo or something.

    Decisions decisions

    --
    liqbase :: faster than paper
  3. I hope I can help by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    This patch should fix your problems: http://www.kernel.org/

  4. Re:Beta Tester by pandrijeczko · · Score: -1, Troll
    Read the fine print next time; it's for testers and developers, not for getting a free OS for a year that works correctly in a production environment.

    I hate to say this but with Vista you probably won't be getting a paid for OS in a year that works correctly in a production environment...

    --
    Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
  5. Obligatory... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    I'm at a loss and any help, short of downgrading to XP, would be greatly appreciated.

    Upgrade to Linux.

    Glad to be of assistance!

  6. Re:Release Candidates should work. by mythosaz · · Score: 1, Troll

    What it should tell you is that dumb routers that don't correctly support TCP/IP aren't good products.

  7. Re:"new window scaling"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Oh, I beg to differ. 2 points, please pay attention. Linux is used as the base operating system on those routers. Linux supports window scaling of TCP packets. Those routers support window scaling of TCP packets. I'm running a Linux system right now through one of those routers, and it works PERFECTLY. Mind you, Linux follows very closely the POSIX standard as well as strict TCP/IP compliance, and also, possibly more telling, Vista is at this time BETA, and the version being tried is not a release version, and perhaps even more telling, this system is being built by Microsoft, and they might not ship a working version (there might be a big service pack 6 months after the official release). Blaming it on the router was a quick try at a guess to the problem, but evidence refutes your guess. (Linksys ships to MacOSX users as well, and the Mac also supports windows scaling, Linksys would have heard about it a long time ago if things were borked).