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Vista PC Guy

Looking through the Glass


Tis the time of year to shareDecember 31 2008

A quick little tip to end the year with.. and this come directly from a discussion with a friend who I will call Jason.

Now Jason has been building a home Theatre PC and over Christmas got all the parts and the time to put it together. He has installed Vista to use the media centre for playback. He is connected to his local network all working in a workgroup.

So he set the sharing up and then tried to connect from other machines to the media centre to copy his media onto it but found that the other machines could  see it – but he could not ping it. If he typed the unc name \\mediapc\sharename  in then he could get directly there but was prompted for a password.

On this machine he has no password and only one account – so he was mystified.

So – what was the issue? Well firstly – the ping will not work unless the firewall is set to respond (which it is not by default in Vista), the media sharing and sharing was turned on and was set as below.

image

The highlighted part was the issue – just turning the Public folder sharing on or the media sharing on is not enough if you have a single account with no password machine.

Xmas ideasDecember 10 2008

So .. it is around this time that you are probably thinking.. what should I get my other half for Xmas – something that is geeky yet cool and will be accepted by the nongeek in the house.

So here is an idea (born from a demo that I saw last night at the BIG meeting). last night Jeffa demo’ed the new updates to Live Mesh – and was giving some cool examples of offline folders and also demo’ed the new Mobile mesh client. One of the demo’s that he had was taking a photo on the mobile and then having it save to a mesh folder. So that got me thinking….

I have a wireless photo frame that I can configure to connect to a share on one of my servers. the idea of that was that I could copy photos into it and then have them appear on the frame – now.. if I take that folder and “meshify” it – then I can save to that folder from my Mobile device or from my laptop when I am travelling and then have it appear on the frame without any other actions at all. Now – that sounds like a really simple solution.

So – shopping list for you for Xmas then – Wireless Access point, Wireless Photo Frame, Live Mesh. Done.

Cheers

kyle

OLPC Project comes to AUDecember 2 2008

Some of you might have heard about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project – basically the premise is to have a cheap, rugged laptop that can be used by children in the poorest parts of the world to try and assist them in getting an education and then in turn a new start at life in our increasingly digital world.

When the project launches in a country there is normally a beginning phase which is a “give one, get one” offer – the AU launch is no different. So you buy a laptop to as charity and then you get one to give to a child (or yourself) in your life.

I really feel that as IT people we need to band together and help where we can. I have ordered mine and I encourage you to do the same.

Start something - http://olpc-australia.org.au/ 

Cheers

kyle

Vista SP2 in Beta!December 2 2008

(oh.. and SP2 for Windows Server 2008 as well!)

So.. you are now wondering what is the exclamation point for! Because it is exciting of course!!! :)

So.. what is in the SP2 for Vista?

The official blurb is this:

SP2 supports new types of hardware and emerging standards that will grow in importance in the coming months and years

SP2 improves the administration experience and eases certain management and support challenges

By providing these fixes integrated into a single service pack,  covering client and server versions, Microsoft provides a single high-quality update that minimizes deployment and testing complexity for customers.

Windows Vista SP2 builds on the solid foundation laid by Windows Vista SP1. The incremental improvements provided in SP2 come primarily from the feedback we have received from customers and partners.

In addition to all previously released updates, SP2 will contain changes focused on addressing reliability and performance issues, supporting new types of hardware, and adding support for several emerging standards

• Emerging Hardware Support

• SP2 contains Blue tooth 2.1 feature pack supporting the most recent specification for Blue tooth technology

• Ability to record data on Blu-Ray media,

• Add

Advanced Search - shortcutNovember 28 2008

Steve (one of the other trainers at work) was complaining the other morning about Vista / Server 2008’s Search Feature. For reasons best known to himself, Steve is not running the indexing service, so his searches are a tad slow. His main complaint was that to get an “Advanced Search” option to appear in Explorer, he had to type nonsense into the Search bar, wait for it to fail and then he’d get the “Advanced Search” option. To stop the dissing of Vista / Server 2008 I did a bit of searching myself … and found that the “Windows Key + F” brings up the exact view Steve wanted! Happy Stevo, plus another neat keyboard shortcut to use.

ps: here’s a good link ( http://www.seoconsultants.com/windows/keyboard/ ) for an explanation of what every key on a standard keyboard does, along with all the shortcuts. Be warned, the last section mentions using the * key on the numerical keypad, and recommends not hitting it while the C: drive icon is chosen … are you one of those people that can’t resist trying out things that we are told not to try? Heh .. I bet all of you that read this will try it!