How to enable/diable internet connection in Vista?

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Gatticus

[H]ard|Gawd
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Feb 5, 2006
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In XP you can easily disable/enable your internet connection by using the network icon. In Vista I have the network icon and an icon for my router. The network icon doesn't show disable when I right click it but the router icon does. Why would a router have a disable option? Clicking disable on the router icon does nothing anyway. Microsoft neglected to put disable/enable on the network icon they put in the system tray. I guess they want us to be connected 24/7 but I don't and I don't want to have to go to device manager to disable the NIC
every time either. This is so easy to do in XP so why the hell did they change it in Vista?
 
1. go to control panel > network and internet > network connections.

2. select the connection you want to modify.

3. click the button along the top that says "disable this network device" (has a big red X next to it)


(or double click the connection itself and click "disable")


hope that helps...
 
That's what I have been doing. The only device I can disable is the router itself. Doing that just messed up my router and I had to reset it. Weird. The way it was in XP worked great so don't know why they changed it.

OK, I have found a way to do it. I click status of my connection and then I click disable. The problem is that then I have to repair the connection to get reconnected and it is slow and cumbersome. For fucks sake, it was so much better in XP. What Microsoft giveth Microsft will taketh away, for no good reason too!
 
err hmmm, most people would never do what some do, disable the internet connection... you could always disable the hardware device itself in device manager.
 
Yes, I know I can disable the NIC in device manager and that is what the XP method does but straight from your desktop instead of going to device manager to do it. Leave your connection on 24/7 and expected to get hacked one of these days. In fact, that is just what happened to a friend of mine recently because he was leaving his conection on all the time. What most people do isn't what people who know better do. I could install a 3rd party firewall that allows me to lock the connection but then it is taking up resources while I play a game. I don't want that either. Guess, I'm SOL and will have to go to device manager to do it. The long and slow method.
 
Gatticus said:
Yes, I know I can disable the NIC in device manager and that is what the XP method does but straight from your desktop instead of going to device manager to do it. Leave your connection on 24/7 and expected to get hacked one of these days. In fact, that is just what happened to a friend of mine recently because he was leaving his connection on all the time. What most people do isn't what people who know better do. I could install a 3rd party firewall that allows me to lock the connection but then it is taking up resources while I play a game. I don't want that either. Guess, I'm SOL and will have to go to device manager to do it. The long and slow method.
Click to expand...

Place a shortcut for services on your start menu and the turn off DHCP in services. Joe
 
Use a wireless connection.

Right click on the network icon in the tray and select "Disconnect from" and click on the active connection. To activate, do the same thing but select "Connect to".
 
Gatticus said:
Yes, I know I can disable the NIC in device manager and that is what the XP method does but straight from your desktop instead of going to device manager to do it. Leave your connection on 24/7 and expected to get hacked one of these days. In fact, that is just what happened to a friend of mine recently because he was leaving his conection on all the time. What most people do isn't what people who know better do. I could install a 3rd party firewall that allows me to lock the connection but then it is taking up resources while I play a game. I don't want that either. Guess, I'm SOL and will have to go to device manager to do it. The long and slow method.
Click to expand...

Or just get a router with a built-in firewall...

You'd be an idiot to leave a Windoze box connected to the internet without a firewall of any kind for any length of time.
 
I already have a router with a firewall but still don't want to be connected 24/7. Don't trust wireless so that option is out too. Going to device manager and disabling/enabling the NIC is the quickest and best option in Vista right now. I used to have a cable modem that had an on/off button but it's not compatible with my current service. Anyone know what I would have to put in a .bat file to enable/disable the ehternet card? I could have one .bat file to enable and another to disable, if that is possible.
 
Right click the Network icon in the Tray, select Network and Sharing Center.

Click Manage Network Connections.

Right click the adapter in question, choose Disable.

Takes like 4 seconds. What's the problem?

In my discussions over the past 2 years with a lot of members of the Vista development teams, one of the complaints they got on a more than casual basis was to remove the ability to disable their network connection with the "right click the Tray icon, choose Disable" because they were doing it accidentally more often than they wanted to.

They'd aim for some other icon on the Tray and suddenly find themselves disconnected right in the middle of whatever they were doing, and that didn't make too many of them happy. So it was decided to keep the option but not from the Tray icon directly.

The method I described above is considered to be the shortest available pathway to disable/enable your network adapters specifically.
 
OK, that method works, thanks, even though it is no faster than going to device manager and disabling the ethernet card. The problem was I didn't notice the manage network connections option. I guess this will have to suffice seeing as there are so many people out there who accidentally drop their connection. It's not something I've ever done by accident though and it is much more convenient the way it is done in XP. I'll just file it under Vista annoyances, along with UAC. That latest Apple commercial about Vista and UAC is actually spot on and is the first one they have done that made me laugh.

So there is no command in Vista that I could put in two .bat files to disable/enable the ethernet card? I remember I used to be able to do it with a command in Mandrake Linux.
 
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