So I’ve had my new laptop for over a week now and I’ve been liking Vista, which came as a shock, but there was one problem, networking. My wireless connection would just drop at random intervals for a second or two. I had thought it was a DNS lookup problem, web sites would time out and reappear with an immediate refresh; and I blamed Vista.
Poor Vista, the whipping boy of many a blog entry and slashdot rant. It turns out I was wrong (take note, that admission doesn’t normally happen). I was browsing through the system event log and noticed a mass of errors from netW4V32, sometimes five or ten of them in a row complaining that "the network adapter is not functioning properly". In my haste to blame Vista I had forgotten to troubleshot properly. It turns out Intel can’t write wireless drivers properly; the problem is not limited to the 4965AGN card in my Dell; a quick search shows the same problems on a multitude of Intel wireless cards. Intel have new drivers available, V11.5.0.32 solved my problem but for some reason they aren’t available through Windows Update and Dell don’t list them on their driver download page. I applied them last night, no network errors in the last 12 hours. Bliss.
So for anyone with an Intel wireless card and Vista I recommend checking the intel download pages and installing the latest drivers to see if that removes any netW4V32 errors you encounter; and don’t do what I did, blame a "new" operating system.