Speeding up wireless connection at startup in Vista Giggitty.

Factual Questions
1

I was wondering if it’s possible to speed up the establishment of internetivity upon startup of vista.

I have a wireless router setup. On XP the thing was actually connected before windows even got as far as showing the desktop. It seemed like the connection was a service (I.e. it would be connected before login)

But vista takes ages… It means that steam keeps asking for the password cebause it tries and fails to connect.

If got the vista equivalent of Zero Configuration switched on.

2

What else do you have running on startup? I’m not in front of a Vista machine now so I can’t really tinker around to find a fix.

3

Maybe there are some programs on auto-start that are lagging the system - click Start. Type “msconfig” and browse.

Alternatively, have you checked in eventvwr? The vista log is much improved and should give you some idea if something is stalling startup. I had a weird problem in that my Domain Controller/DNS server also ran VMware and automatically registered extra A records in DNS. My desktop would take a few minutes to startup which was caused by an attempt (and multiple timeout!) to register DNS records against all the server A records, two of which weren’t responding as the VMs weren’t yet running. It took ages to figure out until I checked the event log!

System-wise about all you can do is change the service dependencies.

  1. Click Start.
  2. Type “mmc”.
  3. Approve the elevated rights.
  4. Select File -> Add/Remove plugins.
  5. Scroll down to Services. Click Add. Set scope to Local Computer. Click OK.
  6. Double click the Network Connections service. Click the Dependencies tab.

This shows you what services Network Connections will wait for before starting. You can try removing some of these if you want, but the only one I can see it might be worth tweaking is Network Store Interface Service. RPC must be up for the network stack to work.

To actually change these dependencies, you need to open regedit and go to HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services
etman (I found it was called netman by looking at the ServiceName value on the first tab in Services above. There is a dependency key there.

Please be careful if you change anything here. It would be pretty easy to knock out something critical like RPC! I’d run a backup first.

If that still sucks, how about getting hold of process monitor (www.microsoft.com/sysinternals) and getting it to log startup. As I said eventvwr should show any startup delays but procmon will give you a lower level view.

Good luck and I hope some of this helps,
tim

4

Vista is appallingly slow at wireless connection and DHCP - it takes forever. I don’t know anything you can do, and I’ve looked, although you could try not using DHCP (setting a fixed ip address).

Si

5

Setting a fixed IP will speed it up? If so I can definitely do that. At most there are three ‘computers’ that connect to my wireless router.

My desktop, a laptop, and my PDA. Only one has vista so I can give that a fixed IP.

6

Does anyone know what exactly it is that vista is doing when it’s “identifying” the network? I frequently find myself waiting a minute or so before my connectivity works, but in the meantime, I can go ipconfig and see that I’m connected to my private network and DHCP has successfully given me an IP address and a default route. What the heck is it doing?

7

I can’t be sure. It is one less negotiated process that Vista can delay :wink:

Hmm - time to break out WireShark. Apart from identifying the SSID, authenticating the access point and then getting the DHCP address (and Vista seems very slow at reconfiguring the network stack), Vista also seems to do a ping test to some server to verify that the Internet is available. If your router is dial-on-demand (rather than up-all-the-time) then there may be a delay there as well.

Just another reason to consider upgrading Vista to XP :wink:

Si