HI All, I am a WISP provider for a condo HOA in San Francisco. I personally install USB wireless dongles on my subscriber's machines and set them up for access. I ran into an interesting experience today with Windows XP Home Edition. I wonder if anyone here has a comment.
The machine was an out of the box gateway with XP Home edition. I installed the USB wireless software and placed in the WEP key and was up and connected in less then 10 minutes. Net Stumbler showed a 10 Db signal, the connection was strong and fast and pinging showed no packet loss. Windows Update then lit up and said up dates were now available. Given the Swiss cheese nature of the OS I recommended to my subscribers that we should install these updates. My subscribers marveled at the T1 speed of the download and we were ready to install in no time. After the mandatory update reboot, we lost all ability to connect to the wireless network. The access point was there but would not connect. I then cycled the install of the USB driver, still the same result. I did a system restore to the point before I touched the machine, re-installed the USB driver still no ability to connect. I went back to the previous Friday's checkpoint, re-installed the drive and still the same condition, the access point was in the list but would not connect. I can only conclude that MS has somehow poisoned XP Home Edition from using wireless to sell XP Pro. My subscribers stated that they were going to buy the upgrade to connect to the wireless system. Does anyone have any suggestions to get the original out of the box Home Edition back and blocking the poison pill? Regards, Gerard J. Cerchio -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
