Shifting to Vista: No driver dramas yet, but the networking is rubbish

Angus Kidman
Sunday, 29 April 2007 05:41

Opinion and Analysis

Microsoft has spent a lot of time promoting how Vista makes simple and common computing tasks easier. Even though I've got a fairly good idea of how to network two machines, I thought I'd try and follow official Vista procedure. This didn't turn out to be a good decision.

Vista is so obsessed with the notion that you might want to create a wireless network that information on the cabled variety is much thinner on the ground inside its internal help system. XP's networking wizard actually makes the task of setting up a network share much simpler than Vista does.

After clicking through lots of irrelevant help screens, I eventually tracked down what little advice Microsoft was prepared to offer on the subject by performing a search on the phrase 'crossover cable', which is not something I think would occur to the average home user. The suggestions offered also didn't entirely match up to Vista's actual interface, but they were enough to get me started.

So eventually I've connected my Vista machine to my older XP system, and I prepare to start copying files from one machine to the other. Everything seems to go well for a while, though the process seems a bit slower than I'd expect on a cabled connection. And then, without warning, Vista pops up an error message: 'There is not enough memory to complete this operation'. The operation in question is copying a 3KB file onto a hard drive with more than 40GB of free space, on a machine which has twice as much memory as the one I'm copying from.

Thinking that maybe this is just a weird anomaly, I reboot both systems. But half a dozen more attempts all end the same way: with Vista abandoning the copying operation due to an apparent 'lack of memory', and generally crashing Windows Explorer in the process. On a brand new machine that isn't even a day old. What kind of a joke excuse for networking is that?

Let's be clear here. I'm not asking Vista to do anything dramatic, or to move files that are hundreds of gigabytes in size. I'm asking it to copy standard working files between two networked machines using an Ethernet cable, something that's been possible since before Windows itself became the world's dominant operating system. And apparently that's far too much trouble.

Rather than continuing down the untrustworthy networking path, I've had to resort to burning DVDs and using an external hard drive to move files. This is irritatingly slow, but at least I can be sure that everything will actually get copied over without crashing.

Transit will continue to track the experience of being a new Vista user over the coming weeks. So far, it hasn't been a good start.