VERY OT: IT's ALL GONE A BIT PC was: Slightly OT: Mackie Onyx Firewire system

Vista is definitely worse at networking than XP, but not so bad as it
doesn't work.

Once again I suffer from 'I want a domestic appliance, not a puzzle'.

I have better things to do with my time and money that spend them studying yet another operating system with a four year lifespan.

XP networked ok out of the box on my rather ordinary WiFi home router/ADSL modem.

I can't get Vista on the lap-tops to recognise the XP desk top machine with the big hard disc we use to store loads of stuff on, mainly because it's physically easy to fix a big external disc to.

I'm sure there's an easy way, the things logged onto the router with no problems at all so communication of some sort is taking place.

The Vista networking experience seems very like the old Windows NT server software I used many years ago, and that was horribly prone to easy mistakes of a 'make everything on the server disc array admin access only' nature, which is a right bugger when you've got a couple of hundred users...

In other words it is yet another security issue for people who don't actually want or need any network security beyond the router firewall that comes with the box.

I just don't want to be doing all this stuff and my memories of Unix seem to indicate that if I get Linux up and working it'll more or less look after itself.

The major issue is ease of use, and reviews of Ubuntu seem to indicate that it's reasonably easy to use...

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I agree entirely, although that's the first time anyone's referred to Windows Vista itself as a security issue. LOL. But I can see that. Very true in some cases - the operating system stifles productivity :-)

The probable reason your machines can't access the XP machine will be down to user access permissions. The XP machine doesn't recognise the user who is trying to connect. Windows XP Home uses the workgroup name: MSHOME whilst Vista typically uses WORKGROUP by default. User name FRED who has an account on a machine in the MSHOME workgroup will not be recognised by a machine in the WORKGROUP workgroup as FRED. You might want to ensure that all your Vista and XP machines are members of the same Workgroup and that all the users and passwords on your whole network exist on at least the XP machine or all the machines as this will ensure some commonality in the absence of a full network domain, and then to ensure that they are all connected with unique IP addresses to the same network subnet (if they get their IP addresses from your router via DHCP this shouldn't be an issue).

Additionally, because there is no local DNS server on your network, all your machines need to discover by other methods, the friendly names of your computers. This can take a bit longer than if using DNS. A quick way round this is to address each PC and shared folder by its IP address, and taking as an example your XP machine with a fixed IP address of 192.168.0.2 and a shared folder with the share name MUSIC, you'd access that folder from any of the other machines by typing \\192.168.0.2\MUSIC and if challenged for a user name and password just use one of the user names and passwords that should be present on the XP machine. I'll stop there as I can sense you (and everyone else) glazing over :-)

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Relevant Pages

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