I know there are you creatives use and enjoy Windows Vista and if you are like me with multiple PCs to network with from the home office, then Windows Vista can and probably will cause you a lot of grief at some point.
So I hooked a switch to two of my PCs because I didn’t have long enough cables for both to go directly into my router, and because I was tired of connecting to one of them via the wireless network. Somehow this broke my network and file sharing to and from Vista. I spent an embarassing amount of time troubleshooting this yesterday. It boils down to the fact that NetBios over TCP/IP had to be enabled on the network card, and it was, but the tests I ran proved that it was not enabled, hence the problem.
So if your networking or file shares with other XP computers all of a sudden stop working here is something to keep in mind. You can test this my seeing whether you can connect by IP address. If you can connect by IP address but not by the machine name, then here’s one thing you can do. Make sure that NetBios is enabled on your network card, and make the following change in your registry:
- Enter the registry
- HKEYLocalMachines/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/NetBt/Parameters
- Double Click “transportbindname”
- enter the value \Device\ (use the backslashes) hit ok.
- reboot
I spent time with Linksys tech support several times, but they refused to help beyond ensuring Internet and LAN connections to my XP machines. And, of course, Microsoft tech support doesn’t come free.
If you want the long and painful version of this story, look here: http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3881172&SiteID=17
Cheers!
