So here at work, I installed windows XP on my desktop..and I really like it, compared to any other Windows I’ve run so far. So much in fact, that the office as whole will move to Windows XP. Which, seeing as most people are still running windows 98, is a darned good idea. To this end, I created a Win2K PDC, and gave everyone a log on username and password. Apart from having to reshare the odd folder, and issues where I reshared one with a different name, so people’s mapped drives ‘broke’, it went smoothly.
Then I installed Windows XP on the spare laptop. It’s an olden – an IBM Thinkpad 1440 – 400 Mhz Celeron with 64 MB RAM. So if it can run on there, it’ll run on anything in the office. And I admit, getting it to install was a bitch. I decided to simply upgrade from Windows 98 that was on there, as we can’t really afford the downtime to do clean installs. The biggest issue was space – the 10 GB drive was split into a 3 GB and 7 GB – and almost everything was installed on the C drive. So i needed to create about a gig of free space to do the upgrade. I also removed every application that Windows XP listed as either not-compatible or questionable. It’s amazing the crap that was on this system really.
So finally, after about 6 hours, I got Windows XP running, alongside all the applications that Sue (who would the user), would need to run. And then I logged her in. Suddenly, I could no longer access the fileserver. I could access every other system on the network without troubles, but not the file server. Now, just to be clear, the file server is an ANCIENT windows 95 box, that will hopefully be upgraded any time now. I logged in as myself, as well as a couple other people, and from that laptop, I could access the fileserver without issue. So I created a new user for sue, wondering if maybe her profile had been corrupted somehow (I was grasping). Same thing. Then, I created a new username that didn’t include the word ‘sue’ in any way, shape or form. Suddenly, she had access again. So it appears, and I’m sure it’s more co-incidence than anything else, that windows XP boxes cannot access windows 95 shares if the word ‘sue’ is contained in the username.
Which is so laughable that I almost believe it.