Can't see Vista machines from Leopard

[ChrisF]

I picked up a MacBook last week, and it came with Leopard installed. I've updated it all so it's now running 10.5.4.

I can't, however, seem to see my Vista machines from it. I have an old Powerbook, running Tiger, that can see them fine.

I keep all of my files, photos, and even share the printer, via my Vista server so at the moment I'm a bit stumped.

I've searched all over the interwebs for solutions, and they all seem to be variations of enabling File / Folder sharing in Vista. None of them work.

I can see an XP laptop sat on my network fine though, but that's the wife's work laptop so it's no use to me!

Anyone have any suggestions I can try out please?

Btw, should say, everything is connected wirelessly via a router.

[NekoFever]

We have two Macs on the network (MacBook Pro and Powerbook) and the Vista desktop rarely shows up in the Finder sidebar automatically. You should be able to access it through Samba, though, by going to Go -> Connect to Server (or Apple+K) when in the Finder and typing smb://[insert Vista IP here] (for example, mine would be smb://192.168.0.2). Create a shortcut to that in the Dock and you've got a solution of sorts.

Same thing with the printing. In the Printer Setup Utility click the Advanced button (you might have to customise the toolbar to make it appear there, because I don't think it's the default), set type to Windows, and enter smb://[Vista IP]/[printer name] as the URL (smb://192.168.0.2/hp in my case). Save your Vista password when prompted and it should work as normal. Both Macs are set up to print this way and it's been very reliable.

[ChrisF]

Sorry, I should have said I've managed to get to it via IP address - trouble is that my router (Belkin N1 Vision) is totally bonkers and even though the option to assign the same IP address to a MAC address each time is set, it never does. So unfortunately I can't rely on the IP address

Thank you for the reply though!

[Taka]

It is a bizarre bug that did not exist in Tiger when you went to shared machines via the network option in the Finder. My friend suffers from this very problem with Vista and Leopard and he too uses NekoFever's suggestion. It does seem to be very hit and miss whether Leopard can see Vista machines or not, so far I've not run into it myself yet.

[NekoFever]

It seems to be less picky about finding XP machines, but even they don't always show up.

What makes me laugh is that when I use Parallels to run XP on this Mac I use shared networking, which means that this computer will appear on the network to be one Mac and one XP box. But even when it's running Windows itself, that 'machine' only shows up in the sidebar maybe half the time.

To be honest, I think some of it's down to tighter security and password requirements introduced for Vista. When we had a computer running XP in the other room I could click a button and access literally the entire hard drive from my Mac (convenient, but a security nightmare), but now even when I can connect it's only to my account's folders and shared ones.