Fix for disabled Wireless Adapter & installing a Loopback Adapter

It appears from blogstats that people are coming to this blog using google searches which is totally awesome because I just got this blog underway again. So what are some of the searches people use:-

• windows 7 network card sleep
• windows 7 enable wireless adapter
• windows 7 laptop sleeps explorer crash
• network loopback “windows 7” or windows7
• windows iis sleep disable
• windows 7 wireless error

Wireless Disabled Issue

It seems that a gaggle of Windows 7 users are facing the wireless issue I talked about in my previous post. To recap, when the machine comes back from Sleep, the wireless adapter is disabled and no amount of fiddling the switch or disabling/enabling the adapter will fix it.

But fear not, oh gaggle of Windows 7 beta users. I have found the solution to all your problem (yes that was singular). The problem is that Windows 7 manages power of your wireless adapter by default. So you will need to go into the wireless properties and turn it off. Here is how.

1) Open the wireless adapter properties.

2) Click on the Configure button.

3) Click on the Power Management tab.

4) Uncheck the “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power” checkbox.

Make sure you save the changes and now, the adapter should be enabled when you come out of sleep mode.

Loopback adapter in Windows 7 Beta

Another problem that needs attention is how to install a Loopback adapter in Windows 7. You will notice that the ‘Add new hardware’ link in Control Panel is missing. In order to get to it, you will have to type in ‘hdwwiz.exe‘ from the start menu as shown in the image below.

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Windows 7

I have been using Windows 7 as my main development machine for a while now and its a very interesting OS. You can read more about it on the interwebs but here are a few things I personally came across.

1) Virtual Server 2005 runs well. Also, my SharePoint (MOSS, WSS) images are running very well on there. I wasn’t able to figure out how to create Loopback adapters but I haven’t needed them. I set the adapter to connect using the wireless network adapter and RDP into the OS using that assigned IP. Noteworthy is just how fast the SharePoint sites come up in the Windows 7 IE 8 browser when I’m connecting to my Virtual Server images.

2) VS 2008 runs but throws a package load error.

3) Flash installer properties crashes explorer.
If I try to look at the properties of the flash installer you see here, Windows Explorer crashes and restarts. To be fair, I am not seeing this error right now. It was happening yesterday night.

4) Wireless networking glitch.
Everytime my laptop goes to sleep, it will completely loose the ability to connect to a wireless network. It appears that the Wireless Adapter gets disabled and will not enable until I reset the machine. The one workaround I found is to disable the adapter manually before shutting down, then enabling it myself when the machine comes out of sleep.

5) IIS slows bootup, significantly.
I have found that installing IIS etc to enable asp.net development really slows the machine down when booting or shutting down. Workaround is to turn off unnecessary services in services.msc and just give it a little time.

6) My color depth is stuck at 16bit.
I cannot get it to 32bit without going into the Nvidia control panel and manually setting it there.

The above were the issues I have faced. Doesn’t really inhibit my ability to work so i’m not too worried. The one thing to remember is that this is a BETA! I don’t expect it to work flawlessly but I do expect these issues will be resolved when the OS goes RTM. It is important to keep things in perspective, ladies and gentlemen.

I am just blown away by the responsiveness of the OS and applications on there! Once the OS has loaded, things are just BLAZING FAST! Here are the specs I am currently using.