Our family has two XP laptops, a Vista laptop and a brand new Sony all-in-one Vista & Media Centre desktop. The Vista laptop is wired to the router, the rest are wireless. We have a network hard disk drive wired to the router. All machines and the net-drive are in a MSHOME workgroup (I changed the Vista machines from the default), and all machines show the net-drive icon in My Network Places.

All the computers will talk to each other and share files in shared folders.

The XP machines can write to and read from the net-drive, but not the Vista machines. Any attempt to open the Net-drive results in the Vista equivalent of the hourglass and a not responding message. I haven't had the patience to see exactly how long this goes on, but it's long enough to make me give up and force a shut down of My Computer. The Vista laptop has previously had an-off relationship with the net-drive, sometimes it worked sometimes not, but it didn't matter much, files could be transferred with a USB stick using an old XP desktop as an intermediary. However, this has been replaced with the new Vista model. This new Vista machine, really needs to work with the net-drive, preferably unattended, for automatic back-up and sync sessions and to play all the music on the drive.

Clearly the network drive is alive and kicking, or it wouldn't work with XP. Logic and experience suggests that there is a Vista setting somewhere that needs sorting out, but I have no clue what it might be. The fact that the network drive sometimes worked on the Vista laptop suggests that it is not totally incompatible with Vista (if such is possible).

I should be most grateful for any suggestions. I'm by no means a Vista or networking expert, so simple explanations are needed . I'm not a complete dummy, but a lot of brain cells seem to have gone mushy since the days when Rodney Zaks' "Programming the Z80" was my bedside reading. It really is frustrating that the only machine with decent sound and really vital data is cut off from the music and from its backup system!

Thanks

Michael
Surrey, United Kingdom

Your network drive (NAS) is probably incapable of using some of the more secure authentication methods nowadays, including the NTLMv2 that Vista insists on by default. (The NAS is probably running some *NIX flavour.)

You can make some changes to the Vista box which will relax its security standards and allow it to "settle" for the authentication mechanism that the NAS is offering. Here's one simple walkthrough:

Why can't I access my NAS (Network Attached Storage) share, Macintosh (MAC) share, linux share, or a share from an old version of Windows