Windows 7 and Backwards Compatibility With Older Routers

So, after much delay, I've finally obtained a more up-to-date laptop. My Vaio from 2007 was really showing its age, so I desperately needed a more powerful machine for proper development work. I decided on the Lenovo Ideapad Z565 -- for the price, I really couldn't turn it down. This machine runs Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit out of the box.

Slight bit of a wrinkle this laptop caused, however, was in my home network. I have a bit of an older wireless router in the D-Link WBR 2310 -- nothing fancy, just a standard Wireless G router from 2006. As soon as I hooked up the new laptop to the network, either via WiFi or Ethernet cable, the router would go on a freeze and reboot cycle. Baffled, I at first figured that I might need to disable IPv6 on my wireless and local area connections, but I still exhibited the same symptoms.

After reading up on a few forums, it appears that Windows 7 has some backwards compatibility issues with older routers with regards to uPnP. Without boring you with the details, the fix was to disable uPnP on the router. So, if you own an older router and hooked up a Win7 machine to it, and it exhibits the freeze and reboot cycle listed above, this may do the trick.

I'm not sure if this is a backwards compatibility issue with Win7's network protocols or just a better firmware update needed for the WBR 2310, but I'd say that's a heck of a bug either on the router or OS side. Even the laest firmware update on the router didn't help, and I had to manually flip uPnP off -- not a big deal, but for a non-technical user, I'd imagine this to be a baffling bug.