Vista has been a very interesting development for the past year, I have been using since its release and there are some features that I like and some that I don’t like. The point of Vista is to add more features, and make the user’s experience a easier and smoother with this OS. As usual they have managed to mess that up as well, the one thing I tend to do on my network is share resources, files, and I do a lot of things across the network.

Vista PCs have no issue communicating to each other, but if any other type of PC (XP, Linux, Mac) would like to Access these folders and resources they are automatically denied access. I have shared these files, given access rights to “Everyone” which is the user default in the share permissions. I have gone back and forth with this for a few days now. At first I would just dump the Data from the Vista Machine to the other machines it was a one way interaction, but at one point I wanted to stream some movies but it wouldn’t let me and so that was the last straw. I have spent hours trying to mess with the settings and making adjustments to network and I have faced failure at every turn.

I have looked at multiple forums and lots of people face the same issue, simply XP can’t access Vista files. Microsoft has managed to “change” the way file sharing works and caused it to be hell for many users. What I have found out to be interesting, is that the folder path isn’t the same as the one you share it with. There are two types of sharing, share folders and public folders, anyone can access the public folders but I don’t want to move a full hard drive to the public foler, thats just impractical.

Folder path:
D:/MyStuff

Real Path:
D:/ ….VISTA-Biz/MyStuff

This isn’t the same path, so something is beind done wrong, and I want to beat the people at Microsoft with a stick. I really like Vista with all its bangs and whistles but this one thing has driven me nuts, and I will find a soltuion for it.