Thanks to a post by Stuart over at The Unofficial Blog of the Unofficial Guide to Windows Vista I saw that Microsoft released a tool that can show what types of technology your current home router using NAT may be able to support from the Windows Vista operating system. Lets run through and see what it does shall we?
First things first, in a very unfriendly manner Firefox does not work with the license page… checked or unchecked the Continue button remains greyed out
So pop over to IE7 and of course I can now proceed
On the next page it wants to install an ActiveX control so perhaps that is why Firefox wouldn’t let me proceed, though a warning message about it would have been nice. Go head and click the bar at top and then click Install ActiveX Control. After doing so a UAC prompt may show depending on your security settings
Next you should see the Internet Explorer Add-On Installer window. Go ahead and click Install, you know you want to!
Depending on your internet connection this might take a few seconds or a minute or two. The next screen shows we are ready to go so click Start You might get at UAC warning depending on your security settings, if you do click Ok to move on
The test now running you can watch as it tests the different features of your NAT router
After the test is done you will see a summary report of what you passed and failed. I am using a Linksys WRT54G v5 wireless router with the current firmware (1.02.0) for reference. Looks like I passed everything but UPnP support, but I also might have that disabled. At the bottom of the report you have the option of going to a more detailed report or seeing a list of routers that support the new Vista technologies. I am going to view the Detailed Report
The detailed report opens in a seperate window and gives a list of each step of the test so you can see exactly what was tested and in what order. After looking through that I am going to close that window
While the tests were pretty basic for the most part, if you are having problems getting certain features of Vista to run through your router it might be worth a test to help eliminate a source of the problem while troubleshooting.
You can run your own test using the Internet Connectivity Evaluation Tool
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