Thursday, June 12, 2008

T60 wireless radio constantly switching off after vista upgrade

Within a minute, my wireless would disconnect, and switch off. What was happening was that my wireless router would be seen twice by my laptop. One with and the other one without the SSID. And once it flipped to the one with no SSID, it would obviously drop off. So after I changed the router so that it would broadcast the SSID, the problem was gone. I suspect the problem is not with my router but with the ThinkVantage Access Connections software. There is another problem with the ThinkVantage Access Connections software. It would momentarily disconnect the wireless for a split second. Which some people might not notice, but it disrupted some of my connections, most notably Synergy. So I had to change the Global Settings in my Access Connections so that it doesn't control the wireless radio.

Followup: It turned out to be my Belkin router not vista or thinkpad related. I restored the factory defaults, and then put the security settings back in, and that did the trick. What made the problem so hard to solve is that the 2 likely culprits (Vista known for "not-ready-for-primetime-ness" and thinkvantage software "buggy-as-hell-ness") weren't the causes of the problem afterall. And it didn't make sense that it only did this with my laptop. Another funny symptom was that my laptop and my desktop would crash the router whenever i uploaded anything in port 80. A bizarre problem. But that got fixed as well.

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