I got a new laptop and have spent the past week gradually moving content over onto it.  And of course had some complaints about this process.

Windows XP amazes me in it’s ability to find and connect to wireless networks with minimal interaction, and the new computer of course had zero problems with that.  However, I continue to have a number of problems getting computers to talk to each other (file sharing, file transfer wizard, and so forth) on the network.  Surely this should be a no-brainer too right?  It’s been a couple of decades since minimal-config networking was introduced, after all.

Anyway, I have the quintessential home network scenario.  I have a home computer, and I bring a laptop home from work.  Voila, a network backbone for my home is created, into which I can plug other devices.  But, as is likely to be common in this scenario, my home computer is on a WORKGROUP, while the laptop is on a DOMAIN.  This causes all kinds of problems whose source I don’t understand.  And I presume many others are struggling with.

Some of the things that don’t work:

1. Searching the "Entire Network" doesn’t show my WORKGROUP computer from the DOMAIN one, and vice versa.
2. Remote desktop sharing between the two computers doesn’t seem to work reliably (there seems to be some magic incantation that I’ve yet to figure out to make this work every time).
3. Sometimes you can navigate directly between computers (e.g. \\homecomputer) but sometimes that doesn’t work.  Why it wouldn’t work reliably is a mystery.

The alternative is to put the laptop in the workgroup, which I’ve tried before, but when accessing the corporate network, you’re constantly prompted for your domain credentials, and I found a few applications that didn’t forward credentials properly, nor re-query for them.  Thus you don’t have full access to resources on the domain from a workgroup computer.

Another alternative is to use IP addresses instead, but that’s very user un-friendly, and with my DHCP network, the IP addresses assigned might change from day to day.  You end up with a lot of trial and error, or back and forth between computers to check the current IP address.  Yuk!

In transferring my files from my old (domain) laptop to my new (domain) laptop, I had real challenges.  If I were in the office, and both computers could connect to the corporate network, all would probably have been well.  But transferring them at home, when only one computer could be VPNd into the corp net at a time (tunnel server limitations on my router), required lots of magic.

I thought maybe turning off the firewall temporarily might help.  But apparently my domain has a policy which requires the firewall to be on at all times - enforced by graying out the controls which turn it off.

In the end, I found that the computers could see each other (by direct IP address, never by name) only when one of them was VPNd into the corp net.  If that’s not a magic incantation I don’t know what is!  Seems like VPNing should make access to non-corpnet resources even harder.

Even now, after getting everything transferred (I ended up sending a lot of files by infrared link instead of the network), my home computer can’t see my laptop (though vice versa works intermittently).  Still trying to conjure up some magic to solve that one.

Another thing that is baffling is that the nice startup and logon experience available in Windows XP is disabled for computers on a domain.  There’s no usability reason that should be - I can only assume there were code limitations that prevented the extension of this nice feature to all users.

This seems like an area ripe for improvement in future Windows versions.  Or is this just luser error?