Amit Maskara

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.

Many of you who are buying new PCs with Vista pre-installed are going through this. The infamous MS VISTA confirmation messages on each every thing that you try to do on your machine. I Faced them too. But I had to turn them off for the peace of me. So this is how you can do it -

your account needs to have admin rights in order to do any of this. If you are unable to do this, then the account in which you are logged in as is not an admin account.

On the search box of windows, type Local Security Policy- Search result is a the new Management Console for Vista. You will see a window divided in two panels. Right Hand side, and a Left Hand side. On the LHS you wan to click to expand the local policy. Then select Security Options to bring out a list of policies on the right hand side panel. Once you see the list, click on the top bar to sort by reverse alphabetic order. So now your list should start with items listed with U alpha.

Now locate “User account control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for Administrators in Admin Approval Mode”. Double click to open it, and from the drop down menu select, Elevate without Prompting.

There are two other policies that you may want to look at. I have attached a pic of how it looks in my PC for you to compare. DO NOT mess up other items, or else your new PC might not work properly.

Ok.. so I was curious as to how MS managed to get its customers and fellow IT industry turn towards using more RAM? - which is not a bad thing by the way, it’s a step ahead. But using an OS that out of the box uses a lot of RAM, I don’t think so.
So I got an opportunity to test drive a brand new Acer notebook with 1GB RAM loaded with Vista Home Premium. Right up front, I wasn’t happy with the performance. It was like me waking up in the morning. I tweaked it to turn the graphics off and some other stuff to make it faster, but the output was still too slow for a new notebook with a brand new OS. So I decided to duel boot it with XP Pro [of course this made me redo the boot sector with Vista again.. damn it!] But when XP started up, it was fast. I can bet if I had two notebooks to test it simultaneously - one with Vista and other with XP Pro, XP would win hands down. The performance of XP on a gig of RAM was a lot more better then Vista.

So long story short, if you guys just got a new notebook with Vista loaded, try XP and note the difference. I can bet you will enjoy the speed difference. Not so good move MS. MS better fix this before the customers start switching back to XP or even Ubuntu for that matter.

As a computer guy, this is what I think about Vista:

Microsoft has released it, just like that.. as they did for their earlier versions. MS has skipped a lot of stuff that they had declared that would launch with Vista. Like a new improved File System - Win FS. Don’t know what happened to that. Work on Vista started quite a few years back with initial code name [Long Horn]. In the development process it lost that and became Vista. Sounds Italian! I wonder what it means in Italian?
Anyways, getting into the technicality, Vista has some improved features in Computer Networking. The way it manages connectivity has changed for good. MS has moved around a lot of other stuff that from what we are used to in Win Xp. For a naive user, the getting used to the interface will be almost like learning a new Operating System.
The GUI has changed for good. everyone noticed!! whoa.. what about the glossy looks. It’s pretty! Yes indeed, but for a hefty price. The new GUI uses so much of memory, that it is outrageous. You need 1GB of RAM to run Vista’s new GUI properly. If you don’t have it you will have to shut the graphics engine off. But it’s pushing the sale of more RAM, so the chip manufacturer’s are happy. But from the users point of view, you will have to loosen up some $$$ to get the new looks.. unless you want to switch to Linux and use similar GUI for 1/4 RAM requirement.
Other than looks and the new GUI, I didn’t find much difference in Vista from its predecessor Win XP. I mean the changes that MS made with XP while comparing it with Xp’s predecessor Win 9x series, it was awesome. At that time I recommended all my customers to switch to XP because it had a lot of good stuff as compared to say win 98 or Me or even Win 2000. Xp was undoubtedly the best MS had released so far then. But now, I don’t feel the same with Vista. If my customer is using Xp Pro, I would NOT recommend moving to Vista, unless you really like the new looks and are ready to pay the price for the hardware and the software.