Sharing Windows Vista files with Mac

Just got a new Macbook, very impressed, have been a MS Windows users all my life. My home network machine is running Vista Home Premium, I need to be able to share files with my Macbook.

Network is set up fine, Macbook will share the itunes library on my Vista machine no problem, so everything seemed to be working OK.

However, when setting vista files as shared and assigned to "Everyone" on the network, they should be visible on any other machine attached to the network. The Macbook does not see any shared files. I expected to see a "Shared" area pop up in the left hand pane of Finder, with the name of my vista computer. I have set the workgorups to the same name.

I must have missed a simple check box somewhere, or something similar.

Any help would be much appreciated.

That happened to me yesterday. Except the other one had XP professional. Connect to its IP address (you can find out what it is at whatismyip.com) and access it through FTP. That's what I did and it worked. Hope your PC has an FTP server.

Cheers for that. I did find a thread somewhere after posting that said I'd have to log onto my vista machine as an SMB server. In Finder, pressing "cmd K" opens a window where you select an SMB server and attempt to connect to it. I had to enter it's IP address. I could also add that server to a list of ones I use regularly. Doing this with the wireless network set to "private" was successful. A "shared" area appeared in the left hand pane of Finder and I was asked which shared folder I wanted to access (I'd only created one intiially).

It works. Here's the good bit. The next time I tried it. It worked first time. Brill.

Finally! It has something to do with Kaspersky Firewall settings!