Thank you for that, Athlonite, I'll try that this evening.
Once again, I have to ask, why does Microsoft make the simplest of tasks so difficult to understand?
I've been using the Win7 machine quite a lot over the last few days, and find myself having to unlearn tricks I have learned over the last 7 years of using xp as my main operating system.
When Vista came along a couple of years ago, I Installed it on one of my machines as a dual boot, alongside the existing xp install.
As time went on, I found that I very rarely booted into the Vista install if I actually wanted to get anything done, xp just being so much faster.
Win7 is much easier to use, more intuitive and is actually enjoyable to work with in a way that Vista just is not.
I'm 33 years old and a regular user of windows for a variety of tasks, I'm not an IT person, but have been using windows regularly since the late '90's.
I've been using xp since its launch and have got very used to doing things in a certain way.
I seriously cannot see why MS hasn't thought to include the homegroup function as a patch for XP and Vista.
The idea is brilliant, but the ease of use would be massively increased if it could be made to be interoperable with machines using older versions of Windows.
Win7 is a good operating system in my opinion, far better than Vista which preceded it, and yet silly things like this take the shine off the experience.
This is going to be an expensive upgrade if I have to put Win7 on all my machines in order to make them talk to one another in a simple and intuitive way.
If I'm thinking this, other people will think so as well.
If MS is not going to face heavy fire over the communication between Win7 and xp machines, then this issue needs to be looked at before the product is launched.
MM
