Wireless Connection App Pre-Logon

[PeteSeddon]

Hi Guys,

 

With some laptops we ordered, they came pre-installed with a lot of the usual bloatware which we remove habitually. One piece of software I saw that was actually a really great idea was a connection window that displayed at the logon screen with a list of wireless SSID's ands whether they were connected, along with signal strength. This was called Toshiba wireless LAN indicator.

 

I have tried downloading this from the Toshiba website, however it will only run on approved Toshiba hardware. Has anyone got anything that will perform the same/similar job as it's handy for the teachers to see when they wander out of wireless range as more often than not they log on with cached profiles and get no mapped drives and end up calling for a technician.

 

Cheers,

 

Pete

[SYNACK]

Sounds like a useful bit of software, haven't seen one that does that under 7 though.

[deano]

Didn't RM do something similar for CC4 or did that not get pushed through from the beta testing?

[m25man]

WZC Windows wireless zero config was dropped in Vista/Win7 in favour of the Native Wifi API

About the Native Wifi API

 

Most wireless vendors have their own utility that can be installed and used for adhoc networking and wireless profile management.

Some of these also include the drivers that activate the software buttons on some laptops and the API's used in you pre login environments.

I have also seen some consumer build laptops like Acer and Compaq that were never designed or targeted for Domain use and the driver set clearly never contained the required API's and as such will never find wifi until the boot and login cycle is complete some even require the user to be an administrator to set them!

 

When stripping off bloat ware from OEM installations it's easy to break some "by design" sequences such as wifi initialisation.

Intel, Broadcom & Atheros all have wireless utilities for laptops using their cards and even if your going to let Windows manage everything which is preferred, some cards require the OEM software to be installed so the correct hardware drivers and API's are loaded with the OS.

 

So, especially if your laptops have a set of keys that can toggle Wifi on/off make sure the OEM additional keyboard software is left on the build also make sure that the correct vendors WiFi software is present such as IntelProset or Broadcom EZset is left installed.

 

You may want to do a factory restore if you have a set of disks or recovery partition on one of your laptops and check that it works as expected before removing bloatware.

 

I once removed some games from an HP laptop and it removed or changed some system fonts and the laptop was never able to display the clients bespoke database application correctly as the substituted fonts wouldn't fit.

 

Restored the system to factory left the games on and the Database displayed perfectly!

[pritchardavid]

Have you got a link for this app? We have only Toshiba laptops on our domain, would make it easy work to have this app on the login screen instead of having to logon when students cannot logon to the laptop because the wireless is disconnected.