http://smmeyer.com/scribble/?p=44
I’ve only caught rare glimpses of Vista in action but thanks to my employer dropping his laptop and getting a new one with Vista Ultimute pre-installed I’ve had the dubious pleasure of making it’s acquaintance. Wow! It really is breathtakingly beautiful, an absolute visual feast of ultra-cool flavours.
I was secretly glad to spend some quality time with it transferring all his old data, but then of course Micro$oft threw “shit” at the this “would-be” fan.
- Vista doesn’t open NTBackup files
- Vista doesn’t play nice with XP computers on your simple home network
- Five days later and sharing our previously shared printer still isn’t happening
Who would have expected that trying to get a Micro$oft product to actually work with a previous version of itself could prove so problematic. I needed to spend almost a day combing through numerous forums to learn that:
- I need to find, download, and install a small application to open NTBackup files in Vista called the “Windows NT Backup – Restore” utility. I found this out here. Isn’t this such an obvious need that it should have been part of the Vista package to begin with?
- I need to find, download an obscure gizmo / protocol called the Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD), previously unheard of by the common people, on all the XP machines otherwise I can’t see them in the network map. Again, wasn’t this obviously something that could have been accommodated in Vitsa itself instead of having me fix the problem myself?
- No one seems to have a solution to my shared printer dilemma.
The upshot of all this is that my employer now want’s XP back on his machine but, joy of joys, he no longer has his CD Key.