At Vista Home Premium - Installation I explained how I installed Vista on a very low
end machine and was somewhat surprised to find that it performed at all. However, I did not get too far as Vista didn't like my NIC.

It's true that every Linux I ever put on this long suffering machine
recognized and used this NIC, but I can hardly fault Vista: when I
pulled it out even I was surprised to see that it was a Kingston KNE100TX -
had I really put THAT in this box? I guess so - you know how it is, you
are throwing something together and you throw in what you have at hand..
in my case, it must have been that.. and Vista didn't like it.

So today I stopped by Best Buy to try to find a suitable card. All
they had were wireless cards, so I drove over to Office Dept and found
a Netgear FA311 - the box said Vista compatible, the price was silly ($16.50)
but what the heck, I was there, I wanted to do it today, so I bought it.

Upon returning home I popped it in right next to the existing card -
this machine probably won't have Vista on it very long and it's always good
to have more than one card.. well, it can't hurt unless you are trying
to install Vista, I guess. Vista only saw the "bad" card - the card it
had no drivers for. I had to physically remove the Kingston before
Vista could see the Netgear. I guess since this isn't a server OS, why
look beyond the first card you see? Brilliant Microsoft logic.

However, after that this just worked. I "activated" and was now
free to explore Vista. And there's the rub.. I'm so Anti-Windows
that I had no interest in exploring anything. I know I'm going to
trash this whole installation within a few days and never look at
it again so it's hard to get excited.

But I gritted my teeth and dug in. First: can this puppy see
other computers on the network? I clicked on "Network" and then
turned on "Network Discovery and file sharing", and ayup, within
a second or so the other machines on my Network appeared. However,
the shared folders on my Mac did NOT appear - does Vista not like Samba?
I suppose that's a stupid question..

How about sharing a folder from here? I created a folder, right clicked on
it and chose "share". This then sent me to the "Network and Sharing Center"
(made me think of people in tie dyed shirts serving communal soup) where
I turned on "Public Sharing". Son of a gun, the Vista box popped up
in my Finder window on my Mac.. but when I tried to actually open
it, it failed. I'm beginning to think Vista doesn't like Samba very
much..

Well, I had not set "Password Protected Sharing" to "off". Maybe that's the
problem? Well, no immediate success after that change, but maybe it
or the Mac needs some time to sniff each other and decide what they
think about a possible mating.. I'll give it a little time. In the
meantime, back to Vista.. umm, where's "Start->Run"??

Oh, yeah - almost forgot: Win-R. Good thing this keyboard HAS
a Win key - first time I've ever used it! Actually you can right click
on the Windows icon that has replaced "Start" and reenable "Run"
in Start Menu->Customize so I did that - even though I'll be trashing
this soon, I will probably want Start->Run again soon. For now,
I did Win-R and "\\Macbook-2" but again it showed nothing but "Printers" ..
stupid Vista, even the XP machine can do better than that!

Back to the Mac again.. I tried "Connect as Guest" and yes, now
I can connect, but to my surprise, it did not show just the one
folder I had shared.. it showed a BUNCH of stuff!

So Vista just automatically shares all that by default? How presumptuous
can you get?

Next question: how do I map a network drive? It's not immediately
obvious.. and oh, by the way, where the heck is Help?? It's not
at the top of open windows, but fortunately it is in Start.. and that's
how I found that "Map a Network drive" is now under "Computer".. I
do not like this new Vista non-menu menuing..

OK, enough.. I can't take much more of this. Obviously Vista's
ability to play nice with other systems is typical Microsoft isolationist
policy and that's only one of the many reasons why I could never use
this as my daily OS (the others being lack of a decent shell, and
that Microsoft is Not Unix). However: I am impressed and surprised by
how decently this performed on minimal hardware.. not only that, but
I realized that while I thought I had 512MB in this box, closer inspection
showed it was only 384MB - below Vista's bare recommended minimum, and yet
the darn thing actually worked! Sheesh, maybe I ought to dig through
my boxes and find some more RAM.. but no, that wouldn't help: it's still
Windows.

Tell me this: Why do new Explorer installs NOT have the menu bar shown
by default? How are new users ever going to realize that IE has Tabs?

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