How do I get Vista to dial when I want it to?

Question

My club is too cheap to get DSL and is using dial up and just got a computer running Vista. There are a couple of user at the club who need to be able just to run a program that does a file transfer. The problem is that I haven't been able to get the dial up connection to fire with anything besides Firefox or IE. How do I make Vista do the dialup when I run one of the file transfer programs. I've tried ping, nslookup, etc. I suppose that I could make it dial by running IE and putting in a delay, but that is QUITE inelegant. Can you do better?

I actually have the "dial when a connection is needed" option already set. It often dials for IE, but not always and rarely, if ever, dials for SFTP or for any of the other file transfer programs. This is something that is specific to Vista (and rather annoying at that).

Answer 1

You should be able to tell it to automatically dial whenever an Internet connection is needed for anything. I don't have a Vista PC at my disposal at the moment to verify, but if I recall it was quite similar to XP ...

Control Panel -> Internet Options -> Connections

You should see the dial-up connection here. If it does not already say "(Default)" next to it, highlight it and hit "Make Default" ... then below there you've got the automatic dialing settings ... you'll want to set it to "Always dial my default connection" ...

Once you've done that the computer should automatically dial out whenever network access is requested by any application.