Vista Wi-Fi Frustration

Today, Richard asks:

I have a Vaio laptop VGN-NR21Z/T with Vista Home Premium, which has been very well behaved for 18 months.

I have 3 users set up: Admin, User A (standard user), User B (standard user). I generally use User A. I use wireless and the connection has been fine, until last week.

Now, if I boot up and log in to Admin account, everything works as normal, but if I log in/change User to A or B the wireless connection switches itself off in all accounts (the light goes off and the connection is broken) and it won’t come back on. Anything I do to check gives a “Try switching the wireless on” message. Wireless will only reappear if I boot and log in to Admin all over again.

There aren’t any system messages/warning messages or anything: it just switches off. I haven’t done any upgrades recently except for Adobe Flash 10 Active X and Microsoft Visual C++ 2005. Both of these were installed via normal system update about a week before it started playing up.

Help! Any suggestions please?

My first gut reaction is that you might look into a driver upgrade. Also, test a separate wireless device to see if it does the same thing. For my money, I am leaning with poorly written drivers for the wireless device. I simply don’t think this is a Vista specific issue, rather poorly created wireless drivers for the Wi-Fi device on your Vista machine.

Considering that in each case we are not talking about limited users of any sort, rather standard users running with admin privileges, I cannot see any reason why permissions or anything like that might come up. Then again, I never subjected myself to Vista. XP or Win 7, great. But I do know that early on, Vista had a number of buggy wireless issues, though it’s not a problem any longer.

Perhaps the readers here have some other thoughts? Maybe there is indeed a bug still out there affecting Vista SP1 users I am unaware of. If you have relevant data to share, please hit the comments.

Do you have an IT-related question? Perhaps you are just burnt out on writing on the walls with crayons? Whatever the comments may be, drop me a line, and you too can “Just Ask Matt!” Please address comments to the comments section above, my email address is for questions – thanks!

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