Technoogies Techno Blog

I’ve seen a lot of weird stuff since I’ve been a professional geek but Vista blows away the meaning of weird. I’m now going to to use the way back machine to write this blog because this happened a while ago but definitely needs to be put on the Internet for all to laugh or cry about depending on the amount of suffering it has caused you.

When Vista arrived on the scene I decided to put it on my laptop first to gain some exposure to it. I thought I was being smart at the time. I have a lot of VPN connections to my customers. A LOT! So these all get entered into the network connections folder. First of all let me just say that the extra mouse click to get there is extremely annoying. Do yourself a favor and create a shortcut to the “Network Connections” by pasting this into the target of your shortcut. I always put this in the quick links on the task bar.

C:\Windows\explorer.exe ::{7007ACC7-3202-11D1-AAD2-00805FC1270E}

The bigger problem to the picture is that when you open the “Connect to a network” dialog, the time that Vista takes to verify every connection and it’s availability is painful beyond fingernail extraction. I don’t know how painful fingernail extraction is but I’d swear that Vista has got to exceed that. It must spend about ten seconds on each one. If you create a shortcut to the “Network Connections” folder then it only seems to add about one second per connection contained in it. Big time saver.

Now for a little background detail. My network number is way different than any of my clients because if you connect to a network with the same network number as yours there’s no way for you to route to the other network. So I’m connecting to a clients network and need to transfer some files over to his server. I’m connected with a PPTP VPN connection and type in the IP address of the server which of course isn’t in any way similar to anything on my network. The only thing that is similar are some of the naming conventions I use like DATA1, SQL1, MAIL1 etc. As I look at the resources on the server that I just typed in the IP for, they are all looking rather familiar, like the kind of resources I see every day. Why? Because Vista just connected me to my own server. No matter how many times I rebooted or typed in that IP address I kept getting my own server. I even typed in data1.client.local out of desperation. No good!

To be fair, if it’s possible, I haven’t had this problem in Vista SP1. Well, actually, I’ll never have this problem again on my laptop since I sent Vista to dev null and put XP SP3 on it.

To summarize, this scenario would be like calling the White House and being connected to Buckingham Palace. How on heaven, hell, or earth can you botch up an IP address? I honestly don’t know the answer to this question but Microsoft does somehow.

If you have a home computer that doesn’t have to do anything but email and browse the web, by all means, use Vista. But if you really need to get something done forget Vista!

- Cory L Curtis

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