Amit Maskara

Here are the reasons WHY, I have turned vegetarian. It is the least I can do for creatures, that my elders say- are all equal in the eyes of the creator.

Every action that we do by our own hands, or cause, has a reaction. I do not wish to be a part of the pain and suffering caused to millions of animals all over the world every day. I know I cannot do much to stop what I think is wrong, but I sure can change myself. I have full control over my choices and so do you.

Most of the pople who are buying new laptops or desktops with Win Vista preloaded and have a small home or office network with file and printer sharing, are very likely to run into this issue. I ran into it, and fould the solution on MS tech forum. It is most likely a bug, but people have found a way around it. So do it the way geeks do, till MS releases a fix for it.

Scenario - you have an existing home or office network with Win XP loaded on machines doing file and printer sharing. Basic workgroup environment. You purchased a new laptop or a desktop with Win Vista preloaded and bring it home and introduce it to the workgroup. [Assuming that you do everything right, you will be able to share files and folders, but not the printer] You will be able to see the printer in the network, but when you try to connect to it, you will very likely get an error saying “windows could not connect to the printer, access denied”.

Here is how to get it to work.

1. On the new vista machine go to printers in control panel and add new pritner.
2. select local pritner, instead of network/shared printer [don’t ask me why].
3. create a new local port and give it the network name. i.e. if the name of your host computer that has the printer hooked up to it is JacksPC and the shared name of the printer is Brother4150, then the network name for this shared resource is \\JacksPC\Brother4150 click next.
4. Click next and install the drivers for Vista, by selecting have disk. [assuming that you have downloaded the drivers of the printer for Vista.] and it should work.

I recently made a successful remote desktop connection between a Vista machine and a XP machine, so I wanted to post it, just in case someone else was trying to do the same. This was done using the built in remote desktop feature on Windows XP and Vista.

Let’s set the parameters first. Suppose you have two machines; one at your work which has Windows XP Pro loaded, [we will call it the Remote Machine] and the othe machine being your new Toshiba notebook with Windows Vista Untimate on it [wwe will call it the host machine]. Variable - You have a Wireless router on both the remote and host network.

Step 1.    On the host machine, set a user account with log in password. Assign administrator group rights to this account. If you already have an account in the remote machine, make sure you are a member of the administrator group.

Step 2.     Assign a static IP to the remote machine.

Step 3.    Log in to your wireless router, and create a port forwarding rule in the port forward table of the router, to the static IP that you have assigned to your remote machine. Windows remote desktop uses port 3389, and TCP packets. Do not forget to save your changes in the router.

Step 4.     On the remote machine, go to system properties and turn on remote desktop. Click on the radio button and save.

Step 5.    On the remote machine, if you have windows firewall on, or any other firewall on, make sure you put remote desktop in the exceptions list of the fire wall. Save changes.

Step 6.    Check the public IP of your network. Easiest way is by going to the URL whatismyip.com Note down the public IP of your network. You will need this and log in ID and PW of this remote machine. Do not shut down or log off your remote machine.

Step 7.    Go to your host computer, [on a different netowrk. like say when you get home from work] and type mstsc on the run command.

Step 8.    On the remote desktop connection console, type the public IP of the computer in the computer field. Click the Options button and type the user ID and the PW in the required field. Hit connect and if you are prompted with any warning signal, just ignore them. You should now be able to connect to the remote machine from your laptop.