Thoughts from Mirality

I use Vista at work (with UAC enabled; as a programmer I believe that for all the hassle UAC introduces it’s still a step in the right direction — a position that only gets reinforced when I hang around software installation forums and listen to all the sob stories from “developers” who bemoan that their software mysteriously doesn’t work on Vista any more), as I might have mentioned before.

One thing about it that does seriously aggravate me though is the dumbed-down (and fundamentally broken) Network and Sharing Center. Everything works wonderfully if you have exactly one network adaptor which acts as your gateway to the Internet — which admittedly probably covers at least 60% of the public (with most of the remainder being covered by people with one wired and one wireless connection [eg. laptops], each of which could be the gateway to the Internet, but only one at a time).

Stray from this model, though, and you’re in for a world of pain. As it happens, my work PC has an extra network card (used to connect to embedded devices on a dedicated subnet, both to avoid cluttering the main network and to more easily talk to devices with fixed IPs), and it also has VMware installed, which creates two or three extra adaptors of its own.
Continue reading Vista Networking