9500 Arrived. Wish it had XP/Network Problems

My new HP 9500T arrived this morning. Very nice but Vista is giving me a fits trying to locating my main PC and the printer on my wireless network. I can see the settings and typed in my workgroup but it won't make the connection. Spent an hour on the phone with my brother who works on compurters for a living but has not worked with Vista yet. He advised me to send the laptop back to HP and get one with XP. Can I do this? Or does anyone know what I can do to have this one recognize the main PC?

Thanks for any light you can shed.

Malinda

 

maybe you should call Hp support.

 

Do you have a firewall on your other machine?

 

If you want XP try this link

 

Open the control panel and go into the network and sharing center. Scroll down and under "sharing and discovery" click the down arrow next to "file sharing" and "printer sharing". Make sure they are turned on and press Apply when you are done.

Did that help?

 

Thanks for your replies. I'm still batting zero accessing my printer on the network.

I just got off the phone with HP tech support. Very helpful but the networking issue is beyond the scope of what they can troubleshoot. Their suggested options are to:
1) sign up with HP's Specialized Group for $149 for 6 months
2) contact "Smart Friends" - another HP group
or
3) contact the printer maufacturer

If I'm going to pay $149 I might as well have someone come to the house.

ZaZ: re the firewall - my eMachine is seeing the the networking & printer a-okay. I'm thinking if one notebook works, then the new HP should be good to go. I could be wrong.
With the old laptop when I want to print I click a shortcut on the desktop to the main PC. A "Connect To" window opens. For User Name I type in administrator. I leave the password blank. Click ok. Then I can see the drives and printer on the main PC.

An Update - it looks like the HP is seeing all the computers on my network workgroup. The problem now is that it will not let me skip the password and click ok. When I try every password I can think of it gives an error message: "Logon Unsuccessful. Windows is unable to log you on. Be sure that your user name and password are correct."
As far as I know the user names are correct and I don't use a password to logon. I turned off the password on the HP. Any suggestions are welcome.

versachi: Thank you for the link. If I cannot get this network glitch fixed I will certainly be following your lead and putting XP on the 9500. Personally I don't have a problem (yet) with Vista. Its too new for me to see what slippery slopes are waiting ahead! However so far it loaded my Photoshop 7.0 software okay amd thats my main use for the notebook. As a side note, Photoshop opens in 4 seconds on the 9500. Fabulous!

I asked the HP tech if putting XP on the 9500 would cause a problem with the warranty. She said, "no", but that I would need to use the Vista backup disk if their was an issue where HP required Vista to solve the problem.

Also I asked about replacing the 9500 with one running XP. She said I would have that option but nothing is avialable as an HP. Only the Compaq 6000 series will have XP Pro but those models will not be available until June 28.
That isn't an option for me since I want a 17" screen and the 6000's do not come that large.

Maliinda

 

Hi Orev. Yep, I had the file and printer sharing on. Wish the problem could have been an easy fix like that.

Malinda

 

Thanks for posting my link, I've been receiving positive e-mails with successful results.

You can put XP on your laptop but the HP people won't be able to help you. They're sitting in cubicles with scripted responses to most problems. What we're doing on these forums is way beyond them. If there's a hardware issue and you send it back, then yes, the warranty is still good.

Honestly, I'd suggest you follow my guide and start from scratch with a dual boot machine. Seems like a bunch of steps, but it's really not that bad once you have all the CDs and DVDs ready to go. I just went thru all the steps again to make a dual boot machine and it wasn't that bad. It's nice having Vista, XP, and a shared partition.

Don't worry about the Ubuntu part, I couldn't get 7.04 to work, and didn't feel like trouble shooting 6.06. So I did all the steps in my guide making 3 partitions. The problem with Vista is things are in different spots and there's a learning curve to find everything. You don't want to go backwards to a previous model just to get XP. You can reformat the DV9500T and have everything. The time spent is well worth it.

 

Hi Robvia, can I use the XP install disc from my old emachine notebook or do I have to purchse a new copy?

Malinda