What the heck is wrong with Access Connection?

I used Access connection in the past and liked it and want to use it again now. I know that I can just use the Vista tools and uninstall the Thinkvantage apps, but I think half the fun of using the Thinkpad is using the Thinkvantage apps. In any event I fired up the new access connection and it is just wierd and doesn't work like I had hoped.

I have a wireless network which I set up in access connection. The network s hidden, in that it doesn't broadcast it's SSID. In any event I entered all the details of my network in access connection and saved it. Now when I open up Access connection, it automatically connects to my Wifi connection. I went through all the options and could not find a manual connect option. Another weird thing is that when I click certain buttons, things are unresponsive. Does Access connection need to be run as an administrator? Has anyone else run into these problems? Can someone help me with these problems? Other than the cool animated network images with waves radiating from them, I liked the old access connection better. What is your opinion with the new version?

Thanks.

 

I don't think you need to run it as administrator, but it won't hurt to try. I've found Access Connections to be junk. For me, it was simply too slow and unreliable, and it doesn't offer much over Windows Vista's built in Wifi connection utility. Now I use Windows 7 and it does my wifi connections very well, definitely the best I've seen.

You should probably try reinstalling Access Connections. If that doesn't work, then you should try going back to the old version. Nothing else I could tell you because I hated using it when I had to!

 

Access Connections is one weird piece of software. The only times I've ever had it run smoothly is when the computer's come straight out of the box. Every time I've tried to upgrade it, or have uninstalled and reinstalled, it starts exhibiting some weird behaviour or just plain doesn't work. It seems to rely too heavily on various other seemingly unrelated Lenovo drivers and you need to make sure certain other Lenovo drivers are there and updated.

When it works it works very well and is far nicer to deal with than Windows. It is however, very resource intensive for what it does IMO. I counted six separate processes running on Vista that are related to Access Connections (there might be more... didn't look beyind the obvious). Seems a tad excessive.

 

Hi,

In order to manually control which networks you connect to (disable auto profile switching):

Tools --> Location Switching --> Uncheck "Enable automatic location switching"

After doing that you'll be able to connect to any of your network profiles manually by single right clicking the Access Connections icon.

My Lenovo is pretty new, so I haven't run into any problems with Access Connections so far. It's very similar to Toshiba's ConfigFree.

 

I dont know what is wrong with it, but I did get fed up with the connection dropping and instability with it installed. Plus I like the built in vista wifi software.

 

Vista's built in Wifi software is very good, just use that instead.