Airport admin utility and Vista

Question

I have upgraded to Vista and found that I can't use my Airport Express any more. According to an employee at a local Apple Store there is a compatibility problem between Vista and the Airport Admin Utility.
Is there any news on when an update will be made available?

Answer 1

I can use the airport express (AX)'s airport admin utility with my Toshiba laptop (vista pre-installed); I installed it out of the box when I bought the AX. Using it was not intuitive for someone not a little familiar with networking i would guess. Many report not "seeing" the AX when they scan/rescan using the apple utility on their windows PC. My suggestion is to use the "other" button and type in the factory default IP address for the AX unit which is 10.0.1.1 and the factory default password which is public.
You should then be able to access the AX settings.
--One caveat: this requires that your PC (i.e. windows networking) is detecting the AX wireless signal enabling you to connect to the AX itself.
--ALSO, If you or someone else previously changed the AX settings to be a closed network (i.e. AX won't "broadcast" it's SSID) you won't necessarily see it in your network connections unless you have previously set up your PC to connect to the specific network name specified in the AX settings. (This is a security measure some may use to prevent the average, uninformed wireless leech from detecting your network, but with a little reading and a few utilities readily available on the net you can still detect it. And honestly IMHO as far as the avg guy leeching off you goes, just set-up a security protocol like WPA/WPA2 or WEP and forget about hiding you broadcast SSID. Helps prevent confusion when friends need to use your network. If you like this kind of info check-out: http://www.ethicalhacker.net/).
If you have fiddled with the settings previously and don't mind a reset where you'll lose prior config settings on the AX, you can do a hard reset to factory default:
see http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=108044
for how to do that.
In Vista, if you saved the settings for your connection to the AX (assuming you had it working at some time)and then do a factory default reset, you may have problems getting on the AX again b/c Windows is using the old info for the connection. I found it easiest to delete the old connection that was saved in the Network and Sharing Center area under Manage wireless networks, which allowed me to connect to the factory default settings AX wireless network by choosing from available networks.
OH and remember there is about a 45sec delay after updating your settings before the AX network is up again. YOU WILL DROP YOUR CONNECTION (temporarily) when you update settings in the AX.
That was a bit of a ramble;hope it helps some. It's info I pieced from various posts on this forum and apple support docs.