7. But wait...there's more!

Updated 8/2/02

A helpful reader let me know that I missed a second UPnP-related feature because I hadn't really enabled WinXP's UPnP features. The next screen shots show how to turn on this very exciting feature.

1) Open the Network Connections screen, and select the Advanced > Optional Networking Components... menu item. The window shown in Figure 8 will open.

Figure 8: Optional Networking Components

2) Select Networking Services and click the Details button. The window shown in Figure 9 will open.

Figure 9: Networking Services

3) Check Universal Plug and Play, click OK to close this window, then Next in the Optional Networking Components Wizard. The files will then install and the Wizard will go away.

Shortly after the Wizard completes, you will see a new icon in the System Notification area (the right hand side of the Taskbar at the bottom of your screen). For some reason, this icon appears only the first time you connect to a particular UPnP-enabled IGD. Its properties doesn't have a "Show icon in notification area when connected" checkbox, either. But if you open My Network Places, you'll see a new icon, as shown in Figure 10.

Figure 10: My Network Places with UPnp IGD

Double-click on this icon (or right-click and select Invoke (?!)), and lo and behold, a browser window will open to the IGD's main admin interface. Yes, it's nice that the user won't have to know the IP address of the admin interface to get to it, but why Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, didn't just put another button on the Internet Connection Properties window is a mystery to me. Right-clicking on the icon and selecting Properties will bring up a Window similar to that in Figure 11.

Figure 11: UPnP Router properties

So, contrary to my conclusion from the first version of this article, it looks like UPnP does give the user a simple way to access the IGD's real admin features... if you know where to look, and if you figure out how to enable UPnP.