"Connect Automatically" box is checked for all the networks in range

Hi Loreto Osa, 

It's 05:03am and I am writing Powershell scripts and came across your post by accident.  I can't believe that you have been left hanging for a solution for 3 years. I'm so sorry that I never saw your post before or the other Windows users.

I am a high level self-taught Operating Systems support consultant and digital network engineer and fully versed in Cisco, Windows, Linux protocols, applications, kernels, CLI interfaces and a host of other digital eco-system tec products.

It is absolutely unacceptable that users concerns are not addressed: Please follow to the letter the following:

1. Now we are going to get YOU to deal directly with your machines NETWORK SHELL and not with pretty Graphical user interfaces which have no power over your issue. We are going to direct NETSH to terminate these offending profiles SSID's which are broadcast as Microwave signals (radio). We are going to get NETSH to block at HARDWARE LEVEL your network card identifying and accepting these signals as connectable profiles. 
2. CLICK ON YOUR WIFI ICON AND WRITE DOWN EVERY SINGLE PROFILE THAT IS PEEING YOU OFF (MAKE SURE IT IS TO THE LETTER - EXACTLY AS DISPLAYED - CAPITALS AND LOWERCASE). 
3. Right-click 'START' and choose 'Command Prompt(Admin). You need admin privilege level.
4. type the following to block these profiles from your hardware:

netsh wlan add filter permission=block ssid="WLAN name" networktype=infrastructure

Type the name of the first profile on your list exactly as it was displayed on your screen between the speech marks. NETSH has now blocked this profile/profiles. Now we are going to direct NETSH not to display them (blocking and displaying are 2 different issues but you have to block first before you can stop their display because NETSH can only stop displaying blocked profiles). To stop displaying blocked profiles type:

netsh wlan set blockednetworks display=hide

You can do the above one at a time for each profile name or you can block them all first then enter the stop display command. Personally I like to do things one at a time. 

Also, you will see different ones popping up. They are:

1.  Cars going past your house/flat/apartment and the people's phones in their cars broadcasting their SSID profiles (these will disappear just as quick after about 150 feet). 
2.  Your furthest away neighbors whose SSID's weak single hits your network card. Just quickly right down these profiles and block and stop display. 

Now your network connections panel will be gloriously empty except for your one (if you want to remove a particular profile from blocked list 

netsh wlan delete filter permission=block ssid="WLAN name" networktype=infrastructure

And if, for whatever reason, you want to re-display the blocked connections (which I am sure you don't) just add "show" instead of "hide". 

I know the solutions to all the forums problems but when I post solutions and people claim credit for it it kinda hurts, especially as I spend hours into the early mornings teaching myself. 

All the best.

This is not a solution. Three years later, and I still get the feeling nobody offering answers here has fully read my posts here or understands the problem.

BurrWalnut's suggestion is to manually select the connection properties for each network, one-by-one.

If you had read my original question, and my follow-up response on August 23rd, 2013 you would know that this is not satisfactory.

If you even understood the problem you would know this is not satisfactory.

Let's ignore the fact that this is a Win 8 problem, not Win 7, and BurrWalnut's instructions don't exactly work the same way in Win8. You can (allegedly) change the connection properties for each network in Win 8, but you can't get there the way he describes.

Quoting myself from August 23rd 2013:

" Further, I would like to point out that manually identifying and opting out of "connect automatically" for each network that does not belong to me (if indeed that is even possible, which it seems that it is not), is both tedious and ignorant of the underlying security risk posed by Windows 8 having the default setting of "connect automatically" chosen by default for all networks within range.

Why do I say this is a security risk?

Because even if am able to opt-out of "connect automatically" to all undesired networks which currently appear within range on the network list in the sidebar, that list is constantly changing. I live in a densely populated area and new networks appear and disappear on that list frequently. Even if I am able to opt-out of "connect automatically" from networks I can currently identify, it does not address the issue of trying to connect automatically to new networks which I have not seen or yet identified."

Your response was marked by someone as an answer. I unmarked it because it is not an answer to my original problem.

The best solution I have found is called GET RID OF WINDOWS COMPLETELY. To that end I have two suggestions:

1. Linux. It's free and it works great, there are a lot of good distros out there that are well-supported.
2. ReactOS which can be found at www.reactos.org

React is another free operating system which looks and feels very much like Windows, and is designed to be compatible with Windows software. It is NOT a Linux distro which is designed to be superficially similar to Windows, it's actually a scratch-built OS which is meant to be binary compatible with Windows. Which means you should be able to install and run most, if not all of you favorite Windows software on it. It is also designed to not be as privacy invasive as the latest versions of Windows.

The developers do not claim it is 100% Windows compatible, you may find some applications and drivers that are not supported, and if you do you are encouraged to report them to the development community so they can get to work fixing it. That said, so far everything I have tried works just fine. It's also relatively lightweight, it only takes about 500mb of disk space. Plus if you just want to try it out you can boot it from a live CD without installing anything on your PC or altering your current OS.

So that's my preferred solution -- GET RID of Microsoft Windows and replace it with something that works properly (AND most importantly) is actually supported by a development community which is knowledgeable and responsive to questions from users.

Hi,

You can check the troubleshooting procedure provided by BurrWalnut on this thread:

**How to disable auto wireless connect in windows 7**

Regards.

So is this where we left off....No Solution? I have Windows 7 with same issue. I thinks the whole world does.