Running Vista today is a headache

TECH COMPANIES don't care much about Vista today. They know that the deadline is the end of January 2007 and they can relax until then.

That's when Microsoft says it will make them all rich.

But we wanted to check what will happen if we moved to Vista today. And that certainly is a mess.

Real troublemakers are peripherals such as printer, scanner and copy machines. There are no Vista drivers for our all-in-one device so I can forget about using it.

Naturally, we thought we'd try it out anyhow and tried to access the printer across the network from our Vista machine. Well, Windows Explorer crashes every single time we click on the shared printer. It really isn't a good sign.

It gets even worse. There are a few machines running on the network here in the Vienna Labs. We use a Buffalo WHR-G54S 108Mbit Wlan router and 100Mbit LAN router but there is no way to convince Vista to see the XP machines.

If I use the old \192.168.0.something command I can access any XP machine even the printer but I cannot do it through normal network places. There has to be a catch but we haven't figured it out.

So take this from an office-lad perspective, in secretary mode, where you are supposed to write, print and access files. Vista doesn't like XP and it doesn't want to interconnect.

We are talking about build 6000, the final code - that is the scary part. Crashing Explorer every time you access your printer is just what you and your friendly Sysadmin need during your super-busy day.

Vista still seems to have a way to go to get rid of these small goblins. µ