Forum

We have a situation that's beyond the norm. I work for a fast food chain. We use notebooks in the restaurants for training new employees. The first batch (175-190) that we bought didn't have indicators on them to let you know the wireless radio was turned on. Later batches did.

So, our helpdesk gets many calls when employees in the stores can't get on. They have to go through steps to try to determine if the wireless radio is on, and most of the time they can't even determine that.

Even if it is on, sometimes they people in the restaurant can't get online for one reason or another. Then it?¡é?€??s more troubleshooting.

There are some of our restaurants that are in close proximity to other businesses that have Wi-Fi and sometimes our computers connect to other systems. Generally not a problem, but has been on occasion.

Because these are training notebooks in restaurants, we have locked them down pretty good (too good?). We?¡é?€??ve removed all icons except for the time in the systray. (Windows Wireless icon is gone.) The employees can only run 1 program, Internet Explorer, and can only go to the training web site.

We are looking for a program that we could run in the Startup group that would show that the wireless is on and what SSID it is connected to.

Anybody have any ideas?

Welcome to the forum!

Typically the client utilities from the mfr will do like you are requesting. Are you currently using Windows Zero Config as the client? If you are, consider using the client utilities from the mfr instead.

Devinator

But wouldn't it still show up in the systray?

We're wanting something that either launches at Startup or that we can have them launch that would show if / how they're connected.

All of the systray icons have been turned off, through a policy.

oh, i see what you're saying. yes, it would show in the system tray most likely, but SOME vendor utilities have a setting to turn off the system tray icon. You'd have to put the utility's shortcut in the startup or launch it in the registry at:

MyComputer/HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run

That would likely cause it to hit center screen at launch and then disappear when they close it...i would GUESS. trial and error my friend. ;-)

Devinator

Check out Yahoo's Widget Engine (http://widgets.yahoo.com/). There are a bunch of widgets there that will display the status of your wireless connection in a friendly way.

Joel