I found tonight that for some reason my wireless card had started associating with a nearby Cafenet access point rather than my home wireless. I remembered that back in the day, Windows XP had a tab in the property sheet for the wireless card showing a list of configured wireless networks, with up and down arrows to choose the precedence. I figured that surely Microsoft would’ve (if anything) made it easier in Vista.

How wrong I was.

For a start, since a couple of updates ago I’m no longer getting the system tray icon showing the list of networks I’m connected to, so I need to browse through the start menu to find the Network and Sharing Center. An annoyance for sure, but not too much of a hassle. Clicking the ‘Manage wireless networks’ link gives me this window. I’ll just let you gaze upon it for a while, to really take it in.

So yeah. All you need to do is drag a network up or down in the list. Oh, but it’s not so much a list as it is an explorer window with icons in it. And when you drag the icon, while it does secretly update some hidden wireless network precedence order that ORDINARY MORTALS MAY NOT SEE, the icons don’t stay dragged; they just pop back to where they were before. You can sort them though! In fact, you can sort them by name, encryption type, network type and mode. Shit, I don’t even know what ‘mode’ is … I’m not allowed to click ‘Details’ in the View menu, so I can’t see what would live in that column. But yes, I can sort the networks by everything EXCEPT the precedence, which is the only thing this list mess of icons SHOULD be sortable by.

Luckily it turns out that when you select one of the network connections, an ‘Up’ and/or ‘Down’ button appears on the toolbar. Clicking the ‘Up’ button until it disappeared seemed to do the trick for me.

One more great stride for usability. Well done, Microsoft.

From the Officer Recruitment page on the NZ Army website -