Windows Vista Slow Network Connection

I am, for lack of a better phrase, absolutely pissed off at Windows Vista and the Vista team.

I’m having some serious networking issues with Windows Vista - and no, it’s not related to the network performance drop when playing media. Since yesterday, the network connection on this Vista machine has been horrible, at best. Let’s recap what happened to lead me to this unstable mental state:

Started off alright. I had some bad packet loss, but nothing that was not normal for Clearwire (the single worst ISP in the history of shitty providers). As the day progressed, the packet loss became very significant - to the point where I was unable to even stay connected to IRC for longer than a few minutes.
• At first I suspected Clearwire was the culprit. After all, it is the worst ISP to ever disgrace the Internet (not far behind is Comcast and AT&T). Running a trace almost confirmed my suspicions: the trace died at the fourth hop (router->modem->tower->clearwire-dns); however, things started to become very unclear on my end.
• I tried to use my slingbox on this Vista machine, but was unable to maintain a steady stream. The stream would fluctuate between 1 and 10Kbps (where I can normally push 10+mbit easily).
• Concerned that the problem was actually on my router, I decided to go into the diagnostics and run a trace through the Internet. sure enough, i was able to ping and trace perfectly.
• Still, something was amiss, so I reset the router in the hopes that the local side was just being dumb. No such luck.
• At this point I had to eliminate all possibilities. I had a friend connect to my slingbox from a remote location. He was able to stream at nearly 50Kbps. Yeah - from a remote location on a shitty wireless ISP, where I was unable to stream locally at all.

At this point i suspected the computer as being at fault. I’ve had a similar problem before where the network adapter would not, for whatever reason, acknowledge that the network existed.

• since i had that problem before, I decided that resetting the network device might be in order. At this point I’m pissed - I spent the entire day bitching about how crappy clearwire was, and how I couldn’t wait until DSL got installed.. the network device resets and … nothing. This time I can’t even get DNS. I can’t even ping IPs outside of my network … and then pinging IPs inside my network failed.
• Resetting the device once more only caused more problems. Now I was unable to get Vista to admit I had a wireless network! Oh boy.
• Sensing I was in over my head, I rebooted the machine.

Can you guess what happens next? That’s right - everything worked again. Apparently this is a known issue - if your Vista machine is on “too long” the networking components will go batty. The only fix is a reboot, and this problem, I hear, isn’t going to be patched anytime soon. Wonderful.

How a company can release a product as horrible as Windows Vista and survive longer than a month amazes and astounds me.

[tags]windows vista, network connection, vista problems[/tags]