Vista Works! (After 16 Months of Trying) - Vista Elbow Grease (
Page 2 of 2 )
First, the new defaults for my NVIDIA GeForce 6200SE kept setting the frequency too high for my 19-inch Gateway FPD1960 flat-screen monitor. Now that was a really weird because that's pretty basic stuff and it had worked right with
Vista
the first time around. I got around that by burning my own Vista SP1 disc with the latest (169) NVIDIA ForceWare Release drivers patched in.
Next, I worked on my long-standing problem with Vista being able to deliver basic audio with the Realtek ALC 882 audio chip set. I'm happy to report that I finally, finally fixed it. No thanks, however, to
Vista
.
Vista
finally had a driver for it, but it didn't work. All I got out of my speakers was an annoying high-pitch buzz like a bumblebee on meth. I went digging through
Vista
's driver database, and I found a driver from Creative dated 2/14/2007. Don't ask me where it was hiding before because I sure hadn't seen it in the last 12 months of looking for a way to get the audio working. Be that as it may, I finally had a working basic audio system on my
Vista
system. Hurrah!
After that, I had to get my Vista PC to work with my network. While
Vista
could talk to my Windows Server 2003 and 2008 as well as my openSUSE 10.3 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 servers, it couldn't work with my Windows 2000 server or any of my NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices.
Vista
defaults to using NTLMv2 (NT LAN Manager) authentication for servers. That was because earlier versions of Samba, Windows Server 2000 and NT, and most NAS devices don't or can't use NTLM2. Instead, they tend to use the older NTLM or LM protocols for authentication.
The only reason I figured this out is that also know a fair amount about networking. To fix this, you'll need to get down and dirty with
Vista
's internals. The solution is to Click "Start -> Run." Then, type in the Run field: "secpol.msc." And you thought only Linux still required command line utilities. Ha!
This will bring you to
Vista
's security policy system. Once there, drop down to "Go to: Local Policies > Security Options" and then find "Network Security: LAN Manager" authentication level. When you're there, change the Setting from "Send NTLMv2 response only" to "Send LM & NTLM -- use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated." For on this, see my tale about Getting Vista to work with Samba.
And, so it is that at long, long last I have a working
Vista
system. It's still not a good system.
Network performance, to everything except the system running Server 2008, is awful. That's because
Vista
and Server 2008 can both use the SMB2 network file protocol. As I write this, no other operating system supports this protocol. USB 2.0 performance is also amazingly bad. I'm not even going to mention Aero performance, but I will say that watching video with
Vista
on this system is more like watching a PowerPoint slideshow than watching a movie sometimes.
Still it does work. It's slower, in every important respect, mind you to XP SP2, XP SP3, openSUSE, MEPIS 6.5 and 7, but it does work. And, it only took 16 months and a lot of elbow grease to get it there! What a deal!
