Just putting this up here so I can describe the specifics of my case better…
Sometimes, Vista’s tells you that your WiFi connection’s status is “Limited” or “Local Only”. While most of the time this is solvable by resetting/going nearer to the router, I just had a peculiar case of this annoying problem.
So, today I logged in to Vista after so long. It was detecting our home WiFi with no problem but I can’t seem to load webpages on my browser. The connection seems to drop off as soon as I request for data. The longest I got a connection to last was just enough for me to log-in to GMail. I ruled out that this is a problem with my service provider as Ubuntu connects to the net just fine.
As far as I can tell, the connection is fine upon starting Windows but fails the moment I request for data. The connection cannot be reset after it fails so, to test new theories, I need to restart Windows (annoying!). I tried to ping to check when the connection drops and I only got as far as two replies before I got a request timeout.
Searching around, I found out that the problem is with Vista’s IPv6 connectivity. For some reason, if you have this enabled, Vista will have trouble connecting to pre-IPv6 (read: old) routers.
Here’s how to disable IPv6 in Vista (YouTube):
As the video suggests, you may need to wait for Vista to refresh. There was a considerable waiting time for my Vista to refresh and, as Vista isn’t exactly known for being responsive, I suggest you just restart after disabling IPv6.