Windows 7: Possible to force wifi connect before Win7 looks for LAN drives?

I have a household WiFi LAN (802.11 n) with a WD Netcenter NAS attached to the router via Ethernet. The NAS is divided into several drives, each of which has been mapped to a drive letter and marked for "reconnect at logon." I have an XP netbook and two Windows 7 desktops on the network wirelessly.

Every time I reboot any of the machines, they always tell me that they couldn't find/reconnect to the network drives. It's almost as if the system tries to find the drives before the wireless card starts up.

Does anyone know a way to get the PCs to find the doggone drives on the NAS? Is there a setting to make the WiFi cards turn on earlier in the boot process? Or a way to make the system pause for a minute before looking for the drives? Or do I just have the drives not designated properly somehow?

Have you seen the following? There are a couple of suggestions there. Have a read and let us know if they work or don;t work for you..

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1465487

You could create network locations instead of mapped networked drives. This way it will not ask you to reconnect every single time you log in.

To do that, go to computer and click anyqhere on a blank space and choose "Add network location"

You might be right, but doing it this way also carries with it it's own set of problems. If you are one of those people who turns off the navigation pane, you can't access your network locations from computer and some other places.

I've searched for a way to eliminate mapped drives, because I ran out of drive letters. Using network locations, and a program called Librairian which allows you to add network locations which windows 7 won't natively allow (except through registry hacks), go part of the way, but you still have to have the navigation pane turned on.

If you're fine with the navigation pane, then adding network locations, or libraries might work.

Tanyam, thanks so very much for the link. It took me to a solution that works just fine!

Another annoyed user with more programming experience than I ever hope to have wrote an app, MapDrive.exe (Zorn Software » Blog Archive » Windows 7 disconnected network drives - Simplicity is the Essence of Good Design), that has apparently worked well for lots of folks. I thought it wasn't working for me, so I wasted a fair amount of time looking at all the other other options down the various branches from that link. When I finally came back to MapDrive, I discovered that it hadn't worked because I was being blind about the spelling of my server and the argument sytax. Once I got that straightened out, I made a shortcut for each of my shares, dumped the shortcuts in the Startup folder, and it works like a charm!

Good to hear! Thanks for the feedback.

Tanya