My company recently replaced everyone's laptops with a new Dell. I rather like the laptops, especially for the price, but the network configuration utility they provide is just flat-out broken.

I can just disable their utility, but I would like to replace it with something else, but I don't have any budget for it.

Does anyone have any experience with a freeware network profile utility that incorporates WiFi settings to suggest?

The only free one I've found is Net Profiles, and while I haven't tested it yet, the bug reports might imply that it's not up to snuff.

Windows XP Service Pack 2? What are you looking for? As an IT worker in a heterogeneous environment, the built in utilities are much easier to deal with.

Not to sure what is on the Corporate image, but on our dept's XP image the OS utility is used.

Well, my environment is pretty homogeneous, so that's not a problem.

It's probably not a huge deal, seeing as how virtually everything is DHCP these days, but it's a pain to change network settings around manually. It'd also be nice to automatically change mapped drives, etc.

If no one has a suggestion, I'll probably just drop back to the default Windows tools.

Heh. So (at least your department in) Dell doesn't eat it's own dog food?

Oh don't worry, we do eat plenty of our own dog food...

Oh, now that I'm disabling the broken utility, I remember the important feature. When you're connected via ethernet and WiFi at the same time, the utility would prefer the ethernet connection somehow.

I am unclear what happens when vanilla Windows encounters that situation.

You can set the priority of connections in Windows. Its in the menu of the window that shows you all the network connections. No clue where its gone in Vista and above though.

Go to Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections and then its in Advanced Settings in the menu for Windows 7 and I assume Vista.

Aha! Too simple for me.

Control Panel → Network Connections → Advanced → Advanced Settings

I don't know that I've ever noticed that menu item before.

Turns out that Windows implements that as route metrics. You can see the data via "route print".

I posted the question on ServerFault, too, if someone wants to answer it there.

Neither have I! I have no doubt that knowledge will come in handy at some point. Thanks Trevor!

In fact, just today I was working on a computer that was connected via wireless and wired, and I was surprised that it was favoring the wireless, as I'm used to wired being preferred automatically. Next time I'm on that machine I'll change it via this menu. Thanks again!

I tested it out and I don't think that does what I want it to do. I couldn't figure that it really did much at all, honestly.

Hmm. Odd. It should do what you want. I've altered those settings before and its preferred a different network interface.

I was hindered by the fact that during my testing, I disabled my interfaces and they wouldn't turn back on until after reboot. Maybe I'm wrong.