Hands on: More Vista mysteries

This is the norm for Vista – you need to give a username and password that is valid for any user of the Vista machine. If you haven’t set a password then you won’t get in.

You can, however, change this from Control Panel, Network and Sharing centre. Click the down button beside ‘Password-protected sharing’.

You’ll then be able to turn this off so anyone can access shared folders on the network. If you still have problems on the remote PC, then check that the folders you’ve shared are set for everyone to share, or if you are sticking to password protected sharing, the names of all those users with whom you want to share.

Autoplay
We look in detail at XP’s Autoplay feature for CDs, DVDs and other removable media here. But there is more than one level of Autoplay.

The drive-by-drive settings, reached from the Autoplay tab on the drive’s properties, and the advanced settings in TweakUI, are both dependent on a higher level. You may not want any removable media to Autoplay, but you may have noticed a related problem – the volume label of a CD or DVD shown in Explorer doesn’t change.

You’ll either be stuck with the default ‘CD Drive’ or the label of the previous CD – even though you can see the content of the current one. As far as we can tell, this occurs because of a Registry setting at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SYSTEM \CurrentControlSet \Services \Cdrom.

There should be a Dword named Autorun in the right-hand pane – this should be set to 1 to autorun on a global basis. If this is set to zero, then a ‘Media Change Notification’ message is not generated by the system, so things such as Autoplay won’t be triggered and nor will the volume label be refreshed.

Language changes
Have you ever thought about changing the language of Windows? The Multilingual User Interface (MUI) has been available for some time for the English language versions of Windows 2000, Server 2003 and XP Pro, and adds 33 interface languages.

However, this is a somewhat idiosyncratic use of the word ‘available’ – you need to have a volume licence or order an OEM version with a new computer. All this changes with Windows Vista.

For a start, all the Vista binaries are language-neutral. This makes updating much more straightforward, with the same binary files for all language versions.

It also means that any language user interface can be bolted on to this binary core. The good news is that all of the 15 language packs – covering most European languages, Korean, Japanese and two varieties of Chinese are available via Windows Update free of charge.

The bad news is this is only available for Vista Enterprise and Ultimate editions. Having downloaded and installed a language pack, you’ll find you can switch interface languages from Control Panel, Regional and Language Settings.