Windows XP Notes

The more I use Windows XP the more I hate it - many things that were simple under Windows 98 are almost impossible to do. There seems to be no end to the frustration or the amount of work needed to make this work.

This page contains information that does not fit anywhere else and it serves as a central location to link to various Windows XP pages.

File Search

Well, XP completely broke the ability to search for strings located inside a file. There is no published list of allowed extensions, BUT when you use the XP search feature, it only searches those files with the allowed extensions.

So what extensions are omitted?

Specifically, it refuses to search the ASCII files that I edit every day.

Adding a Cable Modem

When I first added a cable modem - it would not work.

Oh, the cable modem could see the internet ok (verified using ipconfig and the modem's lights), but Internet Explorer and ping could not.

The cable modem was plugged into the USB port, and I had the computer connected to a local network with a network card (NIC). I could see the local network fine, but not the internet.

After several hours of work, I found that when I disabled the network card (via the control panel) Internet Explorer and ping accessed the internet without problems ... but I could no longer see the computers on the network.

The solution was to enable ICS (Internet Connection Sharing).

When ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) is enabled, XP tries to set the network card to 192.168.0.1 - there are no options, that is the only possible address.

Well, the existing network shared the internet through a dialup modem on another computer which already had that address. my plan was to leave the system with the modem at that address and to give the XP NIC another address. (I want to keep the dialup connection so that I could still have internet access when the cable system is not available.) You guessed it, I had to change the other computer.

After ICS was enable, all the computers on the local network were able to use the cable connection to access the internet and the XP system was able to see the local machines.

Author: Robert Clemenzi - clemenzi@cpcug.org
URL: http:// cpcug.org / user / clemenzi / technical / XP_Notes.html