Building a new laptop is always a fraught exercise and in this case I am upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7 Professional. I am also upgrading from a Dell Latitude to HP Probook 5320m.

So problem one, it comes with a load of chargeable addons and a bunch of HP “value added” software.

First things first… I need to remove McAfee anti-virus. It’s not our corporate standard. To do this I had to get the MacAfee removal tool from their site. Nice.

The HP disk encryption is tied to one user. This is not acceptable if the system is to be used by multiple users. So I have returned to Trucrypt.

Next Networking

I have five problem use cases

I need to use my laptop in multiple sites and hence multiple LANs/Internet connections. My main site is at work and I defined the WiFi connection as a “Work” LAN. I was able to ‘see’ our shared disk resource using the network browser, i.e. the network view of windows explorer. I took it to Deptford and connected it to the network there using WiFi and cable. When I returned to work, it had a ‘homegroup’ and could no longer ‘see’ the NAS device, nor some of the computers, nor a virtual machine running on a host that it could ‘see’. I rang Kaspersky, the firewall and antivirus vendor and reconfigured the zones such that all zones except the internet zone are now trusted. This involved deleting some of them and recreating them.

The laptop has no removable media, and I wanted to install some software from a CD. I attempted to share a DVD from my old Dell. I found a web page called, how to share a CD or DVD drive over a network in Windows Vista and 7, but couldn’t get this to work. The client system could browse to ‘see’ the DVD but couldn’t access the contents.

The third set of use cases relate to Virtual Box. So now I have three pieces of software to make work together, Windows, Kaspersky and VB. At the moment I am assuming that the SUSE guest is poorly configured. I am building an Ubuntu image to test this theory. I know I can get that to work. I can use the host to browse the exported directories using the tcp/ipaddress.

While working at home, I may have some problems seeing/acquiring other network resources. The MS “WORKGROUP” is different at home and at work. I have defined the wifi at home as “Home”, and so I now have an empty home group defined. This needs a better problem definition. This page at Microsoft Answers might be a start point.

While working in the flat, there is no inter-system connection i.e. the Mac can’t see it or any guests, and I don’t think the WE7 system can see the Mac. Again a better problem definition  is required. Home being seen by the Mac.

 

One Comment

  1. I say it’s always hard, it’s getting easier; my last W8.1 startup was easy, alhtough I then wanted to change the HDD.

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