Cannot see Vista computers on network

All the machines I have in my home are windows base. Two of them are windows vista, one is windows xp, and the other one is a linux machine. I acquired a Macbook pro, and want it to work with my current network. I refuse to believe that my firewall is having problems. I am running a cisco pix firewall. Everything works. Windows can see my macbook pro. The mac book pro can see windows xp, but can not see windows vista. I've tried everything with no luck. Can anyone tell me or give me a step by step on how to get my macbook pro to do what I want it to do. This is my first mac.

Thanks in advance

-Michel

if you have a firewall on the vista machine, then that is most likely to be your problem, there should be an option to allow access for certain ip addresses or ip range, or to add a ip range to the trusted zone (whatever it is called) ... better to use ip range if you are behind a dhcp

and don't forget to set shared folders (and permissions?) if there are none, you will see the machine, but won't have access to any of the files

Thank you for the reply; however, my vista machine has no firewall.. The firewall is disabled, and the vista machine is wide open.. It is shared and is not password protected? any other idea what it might be? The it can see every computer that is xp base.

Thanks

ok what do you mean by "it doesn't see the Vista machine" - do you get a reply from ping? because if you do get a ping reply then you can just connect by IP

I have the same problem. With an SMC wireless Barricade router, no problem and my macs could see the Vista computer with 3 external USB drives. Now I have changed to an Airport Extreme ( the latest model) and for the life of me, I cannot connect to the Vista machine. I do the same exact things and config, and no way!!!

It is Vista Home Premium, but I made it work before with SMC brand router. And both macs and the Vista machine are wired on the network anyway...

Please help because I am about to kill the Airport Extrea and go back to my trusty SMC Barricade...

I am still having the problem. I installed a domain controller (Windows 2008 Server) hoping that joining the domain and having a WINS server would fix the problem, but it didn't. I don't see any computers in the domain. I did a nslookup on all the computers that are windows based, and it works perfectly. I am able to resolve the name; however when I do it on my machine it doesn't work and gives me an error of "server can't fine (my computer): NXDOMAIN. It is at a lost cause. I thought macs were suppose to be easy?? I hope someone in here can help me. In addition, I've tried calling apple with no help at all.. They don't even know half of the stuff I am talking about.

Thanks in advanced for any given help.


-Michel

Same problem here . I think there was a recent Airport update just before I started having this problem .

Same problem here. I have a new MacBook, partitioned it using Bootcamp. Put on Vista home premium. Downloaded Ultima Online and several other programs from the net. I found the game wasn't working well, so ran the Vista Upgrade, which messed up everything! Suddenly the Windows Vista partition does not recognize that I have a wireless access, tho the Mac side does.
Finally gave up, removed the partition via Bootcamp and started over.
Reinstalled the home premium, not the upgrade.
Still no net.
I downloaded the driver, but that did not help. I tried putting the machine on the hard line direct to the modem, still nothing.

VERY FRUSTRATED!!!

micheltan said:

Thank you for the reply; however, my vista machine has no firewall.. The firewall is disabled, and the vista machine is wide open.. It is shared and is not password protected? any other idea what it might be? The it can see every computer that is xp base.

Thanks

Click to expand...

Sharing files between a Windows Vista Home Edition PC and a Mac running OS X Leopard 10.5

This has some info on the Vista side of the issue. I finally was able to get in by creating the account in vista and then using that to log in from the Mac. I also did add the ip addresses but it did not allow the Vista C drive to be mounted. Creating the account worked but now when I turn on the machine it has my name and the new account on it. But at least I can connect them now.
Hope that helps.