Wireless Gaming Woes With Vista

[Mooglepies]

Hi all

Right. Due to my HDD giving up the ghost a few weeks ago and dyign on me, I bought a new one and upgraded to Vista. Whoop-dey-doo.

All is well, except for one problem. As MS have decided to integrate all wireless services from XP into one massive Vista Service, I can no longer disable the Wireless Zero COnfigurator, which is leading to massive ping spikes (1600+ usually) once a minute, which is leading to me getting kicked from my precious BF2142 games. Boo.

Has anyone found a reliable way to get round this?

As this is more of a software thing than a hardware thing I don't think I should post my setup.

I have tried the following:

netsh wlan set autoconfig enabled=no interface="My wireless name"
Vista Anti-Lag
Turning the option off to search for new networks
Using the Netgear (Make of both my wireless router and USB wireless adapter) software to connect to networks.

All of which I obtained through google-fu.

Using a combination of the top 2/3 means that I get the lag once every 5 minutes instead of every minute, but this still really isn't acceptable.

Can it be fixed, should I wait for a suitable fix, should I tear up my parents house (yes yes I know, I'm only 19) and go wired, or shall I give up and go back to not so pretty, not so DX10-ey XP?

Anyone got any bright ideas? This happen to anyone else? Does God exist and is there a higher purpose for life?

Also, in before Vista sucks/Go mac/n*x

Or, does that not happen here?

[Hohum]

Does Vista not have the option to untick 'let windows manage my wireless network connections' like XP does? That's what I usually do, and use the utility supplied by the adapter manufacturer to connect to my network instead.

[Mooglepies]

Nope. We all know that windows is the best at what it does /sarcasm

My wireless connection wizard (as Netgear called it) doesn't seem to work properly, even when I install it and tell windows during the installer to let it use the program and not the autoconfig. The utility connects to the network when I start it up but randomly then says the network has disconnected when it really isn't (I was pinging google at the time). The only options I have inside the wireless properties are to tell windows to auto connect when the network is in range, search for new networks and connect to them if they are closer (turning this off does nothing), and another option which I can't remember at the moment, but I can remember it being totally irrelevant.

I can't understand MS's logic here with combining all the processes together: it's not like they needed to simplify it, because they've put it in an area where only experienced users who know what they're doing would be.

And given their claims to be gaming and online friendly, it's just confusing that they've decided not to fix the problem.

Rant over I suppose.

There has to be a fix, but when even changing the values for the autoconfig time in the registry does nothing, and turning the autoconfig section off in command line (Equivalent to windows wireless zero config in XP) I must confess to being totally stumped.

I'll be honest, I'm going away for a week, and if there's no suitable fix by the time I get back and my local tecchie mates who really know their stuff can't fix it, I'll have to approach my parents about making holes in their walls for a phone line to my room.

God knows there's a big enough one from my banging my head on it already.