Over the last several months as I’ve been working in various locations, most of which have WiFi, I’ve noticed some interesting developments. When I change locations, thus changing networks, and I bring a device out of sleep mode there will often be some long delays until things are up and runing. Based on what I’m seeing this has to do with applications that are immediately trying to access the Internet before a connection is made. There are several applications that I have running in the background that upon the computer waking up, jump up and start running like they are late for work in the morning. They quickly try to connect to the Internet to do their thing. Some of these apps include, Google Calendar Sync, Microsoft’s Live Mesh, Eset’s NOD32, Microsoft Outlook, the Vista SideBar, and a few others.

What’s annoying about this is that the devices in question (all running Vista) haven’t yet switched and logged onto the new network when this occurs. Occasionally that happens relatively quickly, sometimes it does not. I sense a bottleneck as these applications are trying to do their thing on the network, before there is a connection. Watching the processors chew up cycles until things have connected lead me to that conclusion. In fact, I’ve taken to turning off some of these applications before I go into sleep mode just to prevent what I perceive as a lag in resuming from sleep when this occurs. It does seem to help, but my evidence is merely anecdotal.

It seems to me, (and I’m no programmer) it would be relatively simple for these applications to detect if there was a connection before trying to log on to the network. Am I wrong here?