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Can I get lazy?

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by santeewelding

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

I've got W7. I set it up so as to manually decree connection to the Internet -- the big, bad Internet.

In setting it so, I caused "Connect To" to appear in the right pane of the Start menu. I have to click on that, click in a box that appears to the right, way over to the right on the desktop, blandishing, "Broadband Connection", then, "Connect", to connect to the big, bad Internet.

Lazy in that, not wishing to drill all the way to China; and, leaning on you, is there a quickie way to do this -- in and out of the big, bad Internet?

Used to be that I did it with dialup -- in and out and gone, default.

11 replies

by boxfiddler

to set an icon to display in the system tray. I haven't had my grubby little paws in Win7 yet, but I've been doing it for years in 2k, XP, and now Vista. It's somewhere in the connection properties dialogue. At least that's where it is in the OSes I mentioned.

This allows me to right-click on the icon and choose connect.

by santeewelding

The offhand nature of my post in my present condition requires that I bookmark this.

by seanferd

Here's one way:

While you are currently connected, right click your network connection icon in the system tray/notification area/whatever they call it now.

Click "Open Network Connections".

Right-click and drag your Local Area Connection icon to the Desktop or Start Menu.

Now, you can Disconnect via the tray icon, and activate it via the Local Area Connection shortcut.

edit: Of course, you can also disconnect via the shortcut, which is particularly handy if the connection is set not to show in the tray.

by santeewelding

Thank you, [b]seanferd[/b]. You, too, get bookmarked.

I am cast a longing glance to my bed.

by santeewelding

There is, indeed, a network icon in the tray. Never made much use of it, though, other than to look for notification in XP and, I recall, in 98SE.

After what you said, I idly right-clicked it one day. Sure enough, dialogue box pops up. One more click, and I'm in, or out.

Thing is still flaky, though. Half the time at startup I am met with a dial-up box that shows mid-screen, and partially superimposed over that, a PPPoE box. By simply hitting the Enter key, everything does its magic and I'm in.

Other times, nothing, whereby I go the route of the tray icon.

Microsoft did not consult me about this.

by older mycroft

In as much as your post took me a bit by surprise, and my all-too-addled brain took a few minutes to figure out why I couldn't understand your circumstance.

The reason (many minutes later now..) is simple - I've never made use of the Enable/Disable Network Connections on either of my 2 towers, only on my wireless laptop.

If either or both of my towers are ever offline, it's because I've shut them down by powering off. As soon as I boot them, they're online by default.

Whenever I want to 'go online' I open Firefox and it opens with default multiple tabs for Gmail, TechRepublic and FaceBook. Whenever I want to 'go offline' I close Firefox.

But my broadband connection is live all the time the towers are powered-up. That way I get XP Pro and Win7 Pro updates ([i]XP is set to notify but do not download[/i]) and Avast updates itself 2 or 3 times each 24 hour period, plus Steam games will modify themselves on the fly.

I also get updates for 'Adobe AIR' automatically now because I once missed an update then both towers crashed the next time I fired them up, so I'm a bit wary of missing another update.

I didn't even [b]KNOW[/b] where to access the 'disable network connection' on Windows 7 until you posted! :^0

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