Does Vista have the same functionality of XP’s “Network Places?”
I have about twenty folders that I need regular access to at work, all on fairly extended branches of the directory tree. I have half a dozen at home. In XP I would make links to these folders in My Network Places.
I have been unable to find anything that offers the same functionality in Vista.
According to the help file:
Well, I did find the Network folder without having to resort to digging through the help file. I don’t want to browse the entire network, that’s why I’m looking for MY Network Places. MY Network Places are seven fathoms deep, I don’t want to navigate there from the top every time.
I also don’t want to map each of these folders as a network drive; this isn’t practical. For the time being I’ve mapped a few folders that contain more folders that I need, but this is inconvenient for a several reasons, not least of which is the added delay in booting up Windows when I am not connected to my corporate network.
Am I SOL here? I liked being able to select from all of my usual save locations with one drop-down menu, without cluttering up my drive listing and adding fifteen minutes to my boot time, and can’t really imagine that this useful functionality has completely vanished.
If you have a shared folder on a computer on your network then it will show up in the network folder when you doubleclick that computer’s ID. If you then right click on the shared folder, you can map it as a drive on your PC. The shared folder would then show up as a drive (with a drive letter) on that PC anytime you wnet to save a file.
If anything is adding more than about 30 seconds to your boot time something is wrong or you are working on a machine that is inadequate to run vista. Most of the laptops being sold these days are just now nudging into the “reccomended” range.
You can use mklink.exe to create a symbolic link in your Documents folder pointing to the network folder. Then when you go to save something, open the Documents folder then the linked folder. You can have as many as you want.
Yes! That’s what I wanted to be able to do, exactly. Thank you so much.
“Boot time” is a bit of a misnomer. Adding a network drive will create a delay at logon if you’re not connected to the expected network, as Windows tries to mount each network drive.
“Drive Z? You there? No? How ‘bout now? Now? Aw, forget about it. Drive Y? Ya there? Y? Come on, drive Y! Aw, crap. Come on, drive X. Drive X, anybody home? Now? No drive X, I guess. Drive W, that’d be right over… uh… W? On the john, maybe? I’ll just give you a few seconds to zip up. W? Right then, how about good ol’ reliable Drive V? Drive V…”
Maybe I’m missing something, but I think what your asking can be done easily. My vista machine is at home (I’m at work). I’ll check it out when I get home. It probably doesn’t matter, but what version of Vista are you running?
OH! Did you tell Vista to allow access to shared folders on the network via the Network Connections Center?
Yes, relatively. What used to be built into the GUI of XP can now be duplicated in Vista by running the command console in administrator mode, and then typing in[spoiler]
symbolic link created for Postage <====> J:\STAFF\ADMINISTRATION\LMUDD\WORKFILES\REPORTS\POSTAGE\2008\
C:\Users\LMUDD\DOCUMENTS\NETWORK SPOTS FFS>
[/spoiler]
Easy-peasy, and the end result is almost the same. (I can live with one extra click.) I do feel sorry for those people who miss having “Network Places” that work and haven’t been comfortably working with PCs since the halcyon CLI-only days of the mid-eighties and don’t have a pool of better-informed geeks to appeal to when they still can’t work it out, though.