Thursday, October 11, 2007

Windows Vista sharing with Windows 98

Problem: how to get lots of photos from an old win 98 desktop onto shiny new vista laptop, both wifi capable, with one nice router in between.

Ok, they talk IP fairly nicely over a home network, step 1 easy.

Secondly, enable sharing from Network control panel. Make the C drive shared, fairly easy too - apart from the password bit which seems odd. Keep the default access control (a tab in the sharing pane) to the first option, share level not object level.

Stick a simple password in there for full access. Enable remote administration, use the same password (although I probably won't use this). Most of the info comes from win 98's rather sparse help files (search "sharing") and it's got the links to control panel.

Vista now quite happily finds the machine in network [neighbourhood]. 98 box doesn't let me in, although strangely enough, my XP laptop quite happily browses after entering credentials (weird username, then simple password as above).

98 box has firewall, Sygate freebie one. Allow browsing from network neighbourhood and stop blocking stuff.

Try again, get a credentials prompt - and this is the tricky bit; it seems Vista expects everyone to know about usernames and passwords, but Win98 doesn't (it just has password).

On Vista, type in just password, empty username. Doesn't like it, tells you to add a username. Add a random username with correct password, it also rejects it. Submit it again, and it works. Odd, but working.

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