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Upgrades and Networks:
November 18, 2002:
In some previous essays, I reported on a new computer I specified
and built. I still have some reporting to do on the new Windows
XP operating system I installed, but that must wait until I am
confident of my experience with it. I do not want to report and
then later find some faults I did not uncover. In the meantime,
I can report on something that came up because of having one computer
with Windows XP.
In fact, I have a witches brew of operating systems. My notebook is Windows Me. Counting my wife's I also have three Windows 98 machines and now, the Windows XP system. I finally decided to upgrade one Windows 98 machine to Windows Me. I did that because of network comparability problems. Of course, upgrading caused other problems, but not as much as I anticipated. In fact, the only problem I still had was, you guessed it, network incompatibility.
Here is what I have learned. There is a basic incompatibility between networking under Windows 98 and networking under Windows Me or XP. A windows 98 computer can see a Windows Me computer on the network. The Windows Me computer cannot see a widows 98 computer. For 98 and XP it gets even worse. Neither computer can see the other. A Windows 98 computer cannot see a Windows XP computer and a windows XP computer cannot see a Windows 98 computer.
Windows XP and Me will both let you create a floppy disk which is supposed to fix this incompatibility. I tried that and there is more to it that they tell you. I installed whatever was on the disk on one of my Windows 98 machines and it had no effect. Maybe that was a good outcome. It did not crash my Windows 98 machine. I will guess the disk would work if I knew the secret. The secret is probably the same as what I had to do on the Windows Me upgrade. That is to remove all protocols and drivers and start from scratch with the floppy. I did not try that. I ran out of time trying to make the musical upgrades work. Thank God I am not a systems administrator.
I found that Windows Me and Windows XP are network compatible with no screwing around so I will probably upgrade my other Windows 98 operating systems to one or the other. If I need larger that 30MB drives, the only choice is XP.
Now, about the network problem, when you upgrade to Windows Me from Windows 98 the Network setup gets messed up. Network printing still works, but nothing else does. It must be rebuilt from scratch. Protocols and everything else must be cleared out, deleted. Then Me will reinstall the network card. After that the network wizard can be used to reestablish the network. Of course removing all protocols disables any print servers on the network.
I use a print server for one printer I have that is not network capable. This server requires the computers to have the TCP/IP and the IPX protocols installed It also demands that any computer that uses it must have a unique IP address. An IP address is just a number on the network, similar to a street address in a town. It is a unique number that is assigned to one, and only one, computer. The Windows computer network protocols can use dynamic addressing, but the server cannot. Once I installed the protocols and assigned an IP address, on my Windows Me computer, the print server was happy and I was network ready.
On the good side, the upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows Me went smoothly. The installer told me it would save all of my installed software and all of my settings. I did not believe that, but it was true except for the networking. WordPerfect loaded and worked just as I had set it up including printing. Just as important, my publishing software worked as it had. So far as I can tell, everything worked except networking.
In fairness, I must say that Microsoft has made progress in
the upgrade game. My guess is, some of that is because Linux gave
them a very salutary scare. I still continue to hope that some
major vendors will come together and agree on a single version
of that OS. We need only look at the changes in processor speed
and pricing to realize what a bit of honest competition can do.
AMD is giving Intel all they can handle. Such a nice thing should
happen to Microlimp too.
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