Networking & Vista

[James Stokes]

I bought a new laptop with Vista at thanksgiving. I could never get it to see my wired network. I could connect to my wireless to connect to the internet, but not the wired part. I have been screwing with it ever since. I started trying again day before yesterday. I worked all day yesterday and about 6 hrs today. I have finally got the laptop to conect to every thing else but I still can not connect to it from the wired computers. I can see it but just can not connect. I know there is some permission I am missing in Vista but I do not know what it could be. Anyone have any guesses?

[Ron Dunn]

If you cannot connect TO the Vista computer from other computers, take a look at your Firewall settings. Vista out-of-the-box turns off a lot of possible security problems.

To find the firewall settings, type "firewall" into the "start search" box which appears when you press the Vista/Windows button at the bottom-left of your screen. You'll see your firewall modules listed, select the one labelled "Windows Firewall With Advanced Security".

[James Stokes]

Tried that allready. Firewall is turned off completely.

[Lee DeRaud]

When you say "I still can not connect to it from the wired computers. I can see it but just can not connect", do you mean you're getting an error message when you click on the laptop's icon in the network window or an error message when you try to access a specific folder on the laptop?

Even the "Public" folders are unshared by default under Vista: you have to enable file sharing and public folder sharing in the 'Network and Sharing Center'. And I think those properties are per-connection, so once you get them working with the wireless connection, you'll (probably) have to do it again for the wired connection if you want to use that.

I'm also not sure you can have a wireless connection and a wired connection to the same network active simultaneously. (Or at least I was never able to get that to work under XP.)

[Lee DeRaud]

You might also want to take a look at this if any of the other machines are still running XP:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922120

[James Stokes]

Well I still have not been able to get it to work. I had a remote session with tech support today. They worked from 9 this morning to 4 this afternoon. They could not get it to work either.
All computers show up in network map. My laptop will not connect to the others nor will the others connect to it. Except through a seperate program called network magic. The laptop will connect to the other computers but they will not connect to it.