I have a Black Berry 8830 which has the ability to be a tethered modem and have added bluetooth to my laptop so I can use it to get on the internet without a cable.

Have never done this before so I don't know if I did it the best way. I added a dial up network connection which works but seems wrong. Maybe that is the only way to do it. To connect with the Black Berry connected with USB I have to use Sprint Smart View.

So now I have Three ways to get on the internet wired, wifi, and the bluetooth. Does anyone have a setup where the computer will use whichever is available ? It would be great if I could just open a browser and if I am not connected with ethernet or wifi the computer would just connect to the BB with bluetooth without me having to do anything.

PS I have Windows XP.

XP just isn't good at guessing which path to take. Or maybe it's that it tries to use all enabled connections. Not sure.

Whatever, I just manage it by disabling everything but the path I want it to use.

When using WiFi I even go so far as to blacklist all the neighbors APs.

You definitely have to set up a Bluetooth tether as "dial-up networking", so that's right.

By default, XP will use whichever interface it thinks is the fastest, based on, I'm pretty sure, that interface's theoretical max throughput. This is pretty straightforward with LAN connections (1Gb/s > 100Mb/s > 16Mb/s > 10Mb/s > 4Mb/s), but less so when you add WLAN connections into the mix (108Mb/s >? 100Mbps). I have no idea what it thinks that the max throughput on a Bluetooth DUN will be.

Fortunately, all of this is tweakable by using route metrics, which is how XP implements this anyway. So you should be able to set the metric on your DUN interface to be very high and have it use that only when none of the other interfaces are available. (Use the "route" command from a command prompt. Use "-p" to make your changes survive reboot.) That said, I'm not totally sure how XP deals with DUN interfaces, so it might be more complicated than I'm making it sound.

When I had XP, I used for a long time to change metrics as needed, successfully (as mentioned by Bitt). Route metrics are there just for that purpose.

Also, you may set the metric value via GUI (advanced settings of the TCP/IP protocol), if you wish.

I still have some scripts I use to run to get a static IP address, when I need, and you may use that to set metrics as well.

I see the metrics box in the TCP/IP properties for the lan and wifi connections but not for the DUN connection.

I don't have XP with DUN connection handy, unfortunately. Have you tried with the command line?



Will assing metric 10 to the connection named "LAN", and static IPs and gateway. You should be able to apply it to the DUN interface, provided that you change "LAN" to the DUN connection name.