Dosboy's Bits and Bytes

I know, it's been awhile since there's been a technology rant, and my loyal fans must be chomping at the bit to know what piece of tech has been my biggest hindrance in the 3 days since I left. Well, what would my first rant be without paying tribute to the biggest pain in my ass since the CONFIG.SYS of OS/2... Vista! Yup, no matter how hard I try to make it purr like a kitten, it never fails to moo like a cow.

So here's the scenario. I'm hanging out with Ken and I think to myself, "I should check my email". So I ask Ken what his wireless settings are and he provides them, with the following caveat - "Are you running Vista? Cuz it doesn't work for some reason. It disconnects every 10 mins requiring a reboot or doesn't work at all. I reloaded XP on my Vista laptop and it works perfectly now". Hmm... this seems odd to me. Not because Vista is bulletproof, but because Ken is a smart guy. So I go through the standard connection rigmarole and it says I'm connected. But I can't surf. DNS resolution seems to be alright, ping/traceroute work fine, IM is connected... but no surfing. Neither Firefox nor IE are able to hit a website. Also, this does not appear to be a wireless issue but rather a full-on networking / TCP/IP issue. So I hop onto Ken's laptop and check my email, firing off a tech support message to Gregg in the meantime as he's actually been doing a little Vista support for awhile now. I get a message back from him awhile later suggesting the following things:

1. Network Discovery (as in disable the bastard) - http://www.home-network-help.com/network-discovery.html
2. Disable IPv6

Well, whaddya know but option (1) did the trick. It still seems that after a few hours I lose HTTP again, but that's far more acceptable than the previous situation, especially since I'm not going to be here all that long. So, the long and short of it is that MS has made Vista too "smart" for its own good. I shouldn't have to disable a feature like this just to surf the web (especially since the actual usage of Network Discovery is to detect other network devices LOCALLY; shouldn't have anything to do with what's beyond my gateway). Effing Microsoft. Effing Vista.