Topic: Need some Vista to XP LAN help

[Pugnate]

I had a day off today, as did my sister, so we decided to play some games on LAN. Long story short, we can’t see other in the LAN rooms in most titles. It has been an extremely frustrating experience so far, and I’ve tried plenty of internet remedies.

I am using Vista while she is on XP connecting to my computer wirelessly, where my computer is acting as the access point to the home DSL. We can see each other on our respective Operating Systems OK. We can see the shared folders and can manipulate them without issue either.

The problem arises when we try to game. The only two we have no issues with are Opposing Fronts, and Titan Quest. Others like WiC, C&C3, Gears of War, UT3 etc aren’t working on LAN, where we don’t see each other despite exhausting the refresh button.

Interestingly, when I boot to XP instead, all of the games work fine in LAN. We can see other OK, but as soon as I switch to Vista, we can’t, save for two titles. Like I said, everything else in terms of her accessing the internet through my computer, or sharing folders is fine.

I welcome any suggestions. Help me Obi Wan.   

Before anyone asks, all firewalls and antivirus programs are off.

[Quemaqua]

Uh... use XP?

[Pugnate]

My heart sunk when I saw the only reply to my thread was from Que. I still clicked.

[Quemaqua]

Haha, sorry... I guess you were anticipating some snarky bullshit, eh?

Wish I had an answer for you.  But in all seriousness, why is it that you don't want to just use XP?  Too much of a hassle with your dual-boot setup or what?  I would think having such a setup would be advantageous for just this very reason.

[Xessive]

I recall we were having network issues in the office. My laptop is the only one that has Vista (because that's what it came with when it was purchased).

My first suspect would the anal Vista firewall. Make sure that all your games have access etc.

[Pugnate]

Haha, sorry... I guess you were anticipating some snarky bullshit, eh?

hahah... well to be honest, the word "snarky" was exactly what I wrote first, with a smile, but I quickly changed it because I didn't want to sound at all negative. I meant it in a good way, like how you see one response to a long post from say W&C (hilariously mocking comment),or Idol (Pics/Boobies), or Cobra (thoughtful response), and can have a fair idea of what to expect. 

But in all seriousness, why is it that you don't want to just use XP?  Too much of a hassle with your dual-boot setup or what?  I would think having such a setup would be advantageous for just this very reason.

Initially most of my games were on XP, but then I had some BSOD XP only issues, that at the time I didn't realize had to do with my PSU. So I painfully switched everything to Vista, where there were no crashes, till my PSU just gave away all together. Afterwards I just let things stay.

With this issue, I have about six games that I'll need to uinstall on Vista, and the reinstall and patch on XP. That should take 30 minutes per game at least.

Plus I am the sort of person who gets very persistent (anal is actually a better word), until a problem is resolved. The whole affair drove me up the wall, just because I had to know why. 

STEAM is pretty convenient in such an admittedly rare situation, where you can run the same installed STEAM games from both operating systems without having to modify anything.

My first suspect would the anal Vista firewall. Make sure that all your games have access etc.

I refer you to the last line of my first post.

[scottws]

No idea, Vista changed a lot of its networking stuff.  For instance, you can't access network shares on a Vista machine from Linux.

[Ghandi]

I think that I've isolated the problem - your "3goats1man.mpg" download seems to be using up all the bandwidth. And you set it to be the highest priority. I've had a similar problem before, just pause the download and you'll be good to go.

[scottws]

Hahahahahahahahaha!  Wow, good stuff.

[Pugnate]

I laughed my ass off as well.

I wonder if someone has taken that as a domain name.

[Antares]

I'd type in the URL myself but I'm afraid the FBI will come raid my house 

[Xessive]

Hehe sorry, I always reply to your posts a few lines early

Vista just complicates things unnecessarily.

[scottws]

Vista just complicates things unnecessarily.

One of my biggest peeves is the file system security.  It's still NTFS, but when you throw the UAC in, it really mucks things up.

Like Program Files and Program Files (x86)... Of course they have the Administrators group at Full Control and Users with Read & Execute.  And I am a member of this group.  However, since many games try to create various files when they start, they fail unless you explicitly started the game with administrator rights.  It's weird... many programs will bring up the UAC prompt if they need admin access to do something, but games don't.  They'll instead say stuff like the disk is full.

What really bugs me if you want to edit a config file, you will open it in notepad or something without any indication of a problem.  And then you'll try to save it and get access denied, even though the file is writable by the Administrators group and you are in the Administrators group.  No UAC prompt.  You have to open notepad w/ admin rights, then open the file.  Or you have to give your explicit user account permissions in the folder.  I hates it!

[Pugnate]

The first thing I did after installing Vista was to turn the annoying UAC off.

[beo]

i'm starting to think that there's an issue with the way vista handles wifi connections.

i'm on vista, while my housemate is on xp and we've had problems playing games on our lan via wifi. with c&c3 we have to create an internet game and join that - which seems utterly bizarre. we don't play a lot of lan games together, so we've never bothered looking into getting the issue resolved.

however, i went to a lan last weekend, where we were all on ethernet connections and there were no problems at all, despite the mix of xp and vista machines. once we'd all taken down our firewalls, everything just worked.

anyway, i'd try setting it up as a wired connection and see what happens - at the very least it would eliminate that as a factor.

[Xessive]

The first thing I did after installing Vista was to turn the annoying UAC off.

How do I turn it off by the way?

The stupid UAC has caused a few failures on my system when it interrupts everything the PC is doing to ask for my permission.

[scottws]

I think it's in the user section someplace.

[Pugnate]

1. Open Control Panel.
2. Under User Account and Family settings click on the "Add or remove user account".
3. Click on one of the user accounts, for example you can use the Guest account.
4. Under the user account click on the "Go to the main User Account page" link.
5. Under "Make changes to your user account" click on the "Change security settings" link.
6. In the "Turn on User Account Control (UAC) to make your computer more secure" click to unselect the "Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer". Click on the Ok button.
7. You will be prompted to reboot your computer. Do so when ready.

From some googled website.

I can't imagine using Vista without disabling UAC first. It was driving me up the wall, for the full fifteen minutes that it was on.

[scottws]

See, I have the Linux laptop so UAC is pretty similar to what goes on there with the provide root password thing.  But the file permissions thing is crazy.  If I have permissions to write, I shouldn't have to open it as admin first.

[Xessive]

I understand why we should have user account/access control, what I don't understand is why the administrator account needs it (I AM THE ADMIN!!) and why the Hell I have to give permission every single time??

In Mac OS X and in Linux it only ever asks for the password when you're installing/uninstalling or whyen you're making significant system changes. Vista requires permission for the most trivial things i.e. changing anything in the start menu. And a lot of apps bring up the stupid permission dialogue even if I right-click and select "Run as Administrator." No matter what options I have set in the security and privileges, it doesn't affect it whatsoever.

I finally disabled the stupid UAC, now I have the annoying security monitor nagging me about activating it.. How do I shut it up?

[Pugnate]

I always thought it was meant to be a straight jacket for the inexperienced computer users.

I finally disabled the stupid UAC, now I have the annoying security monitor nagging me about activating it.. How do I shut it up?

hahahaha... how long have you been with Vista? Its actually pretty nifty once you put away that stuff. Anyway I think you have to go to the security center and just turn off all alerts from there. 

[Xessive]

It's been a few months now.. I still don't like it.

So far here's my comparison between Vista & XP:

What's Better?
-High resolution icons
-Greater stability and crash handling
-Start Search is handy

What's worse? (Practically everything else)
-View option limitations (can't necessarily select the exact icon size etc.)
-Start menu sucks (I love the XP menu, but now it's either vista or classic? WTF?)
-"Sort by name" now arranges everything instantly, rather than giving me the option, and there's no generic "auto-arrange" anymore.
-I can't change filetype icons (seems really complicated now)
-File transfers are so much slower. Things that normally take 5 minutes will take about 10.

There are more things I'm sure, I just can't think of them off the top of my head.

Honestly the only real advantage Vista has over XP is DirectX 10 and that's only because Microsoft refuses to release it for XP.

[Pugnate]

And apparently true DX10 hasn't shown its colors yet.

Start menu sucks (I love the XP menu, but now it's either vista or classic? WTF?

Yes that was the first thing that confused me. Why change stuff? But I used the "customize taskbar" option, to make it look exactly the same as I had it on XP.

[scottws]

Yeah I've been with Vista a few months now and definitely like XP more.  I would go back if I could do it in 10 minutes.  But on top of just the install of the OS, patching, installing applications (several hours right there), I also customize security and move user profiles to my 2nd hard drive and do other registry hacks.  It's like a half-a-day thing.

[Xessive]

It'll have to be a weekend thing, Scott hehe

The Start menu is all haywire now.. First off why is it setup like a file tree now?? Why is it limited to half the size of the start panel? And why are the folders arranged as secondary?? I don't understand why they completely fudged it up without even giving us the option.

I like the initial start panel (it's basically XP with the search slot), it's just the All Programs menu that's completely fudged up.

The things I'd like changed don't appear to be in the taskbar's 'customize' options.

I understand when they add new options, but I am completely bewildered why the f*ck they would remove previously available options??!

[Pugnate]

First off why is it setup like a file tree now??

Oh that. Yea I hate that.

What I don't understand is when for no reason, developers switch minor things around from previous versions, that users had grown accustom to.

Like for a while, you couldn't customize the control keys in the Fifa games, and between 96 and 200, they'd change one of the control keys to something else, for no reason. For example, one year, you'd get used to using "E" as sprint, but then in the next Fifa they'd switch it to the "W" key, only because being employed by EA meant they had to assholes. (Though back then EA was pretty good.)

Even in Vista, you've got simple stuff moved around for no bloody reason.

For example, in XP, you could view folder options by just clicking on "Tools" in any window. Now you can only do it from the control panel. That too, I had to find out through Google.

Why would they do this?

WHY? WHY? WHY?

[Xessive]

For example, in XP, you could view folder options by just clicking on "Tools" in any window. Now you can only do it from the control panel. That too, I had to find out through Google.

Why would they do this?

WHY? WHY? WHY?

That was tedious. You can do it from the "Organize" button too.. I too don't understand why they shifted so much around unnecessarily.

I'm having a tough time figuring out how to properly customize file types.. All I can achieve though the Control panel is choosing which program is the default for each file type, but I can't customize the open/play parameters and I can't change the icons.

I was hoping Vista would just be a matter of getting used to it, but it's far from that. It's so dense that we may as well do without it.

[Quemaqua]

In the end, I think we'll pretty much be doing without Vista in general.  All the whispering going around now seems to be pointing to a new OS coming out to replace this broken piece of shit they dropped on us, so much so that I'm almost convinced it'll happen.  I'm happy with XP, though, and they're going to need a hell of a lot more than DX10 to pull me onto Vista 2 or whatever else they cook up.

[scottws]

Yeah, basically I think of it like this:

Windows Vista : Windows XP :: Windows ME : Windows 98SE

Basically, Vista is a crappy, buggy, unnecessary POS just like ME was.

[Pugnate]

I don't know if I've mentioned this here, but the day Bill Gates was retiring, some journalist asking him if there were ever any regrets in terms of pushing out a piece of software too early.

He replied with,"Ask me when we release our next OS."

I'm happy with XP, though, and they're going to need a hell of a lot more than DX10 to pull me onto Vista 2 or whatever else they cook up.

Even DX10 is yet to be implemented properly, and no single slot GPU of today can run DX10 properly without significant performance hits. In fact there is plenty of talk that the reason why Crysis could be hacked to run DX10 effects in XP was that it wasn't released with DX10 in Vista either. There are plenty of reports that at max settings on "DX10" Vista, Crysis pales to the E3 visuals. Looks like they are waiting, till the market catches up.

Even FS:X, which was supposed to razzle dazzle with DX10, is yet to get a full DX10 patch. Something is fishy here, and the problem may be that there isn't a pure DX10 GPU solution as of yet. 

[Xessive]

Didn't MS at some point suggest that they were going to release a new DirectX for XP which compensates for them not releasing of DX10 for XP?

The rumours on "codename: Windows 7" are intriguing, but so far it just looks like a revamped Vista, rather than a new OS altogether.

Speaking of new OS, anyone heard of this OS Microsoft developed for educational purposes called Singularity? It seems to be generating a lot of attention.

The only thing really tying me down to Windows is gaming.. If not for that I'd have already switched completely to Mac or Linux. However, if Microsoft kill XP and leave us no choice but an OS that looks like it was excreted by Vista then I may have to switch and abandon PC gaming.

[Pugnate]

I'll be honest. I don't dislike Vista like some of you. I find some of the changes are fairly cool, and it looks nice. Having said that, if I had paid for this, I'd be pretty pissed.

The rumours on "codename: Windows 7" are intriguing, but so far it just looks like a revamped Vista, rather than a new OS altogether.

Well, if they do a job like XP was to Windows 2000, then it isn't so bad.

[scottws]

Oh, there's no question that Aero is neat.  But other than that, all the cool Vista features were removed, like WinFS and the virtual, linked file structure instead of the standard absolute/tree hierarchy.  Some of its changes were highly questionable.  UAC is well intentioned, but is inconsistent.  File transfers over the network are dog slow, even after SP1 (which improved things quite a bit).  The OS footprint on the hdd is huge as well.

On my 80 GB drive, when I had XP I had a shitload of apps and like 12 games all installed at the same time and still had like 17 GB of free space.  With Vista, I have about four games and only apps I use all the time installed and I'm constantly around 5 GB free.  That's insane.

In any case, I don't look down on you for liking Vista.  I just personally think there is very little good about it, and certainly there is absolutely no reason to pay for an upgrade.

[Pugnate]

Well I'd take Vista over XP, if one was starting a high end system with 2GB RAM from scratch.

However I don't see any value in spending $150+ on Vista, if one already owns XP. All the nifty additions aren't worth that much.

Currently I am using magic underworld copies for both XP and Vista, despite having bought XP legitimately. I have unfortunately exhausted all my XP activations.

[scottws]

I think the one thing keeping me on Vista is that I have 4 GB of RAM, which dictates I use x64.  Well, WinXP x64 apparently sucks.