Trouble connecting to non broadcasting networks?

Hey everybody,

I was having this problem and it was really bugging me so I thought I would post the solution here in case others are dealing with it as well.

As a security measure on my wireless network I had disabled SSID broadcast, in addition to MAC filtering and encryption. Things were fine under XP but when I switched to Vista I was having trouble connecting to the router. On the first attempt, when I would add the non-broadcasting network it would work but after rebooting it wouldn't connect automatically and I had to remove and re-add the network.

I finally found the solution. If you go into "Manage Wireless Networks" and right click on the network and go to properties there is an option called "connect even if the network is not broadcasting." By default this is unchecked and you don't have the option to choose when you add the network, you have to come back and do it afterwards the way I described.

There is a Microsoft article that explains why Vista is set up like this and it talks about non-broadcasting networks not being a security feature and why.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb726942.aspx

Whether you agree or not, now you can set it up to work either way.

Cheers,

Philip