As I find myself rarely needing to network my MacBook Pro with anything nowadays I inevitably find myself having to trawl a noise of Google results to obtain the desired effect.
Should be straightforward enough. I’ve enabled file sharing on the mac and been networking most flavours of Windows over the years. The problem is that on authenticating as the appropriate mac user from the Vista end the expected mac user-name format of macmachinename\user-name isn’t accepted.
I’ve come across various solutions that involve tweaking the Vista registry but as it’s never been my Windows machine I’m loathe to go a-fiddling. As a quick and dirty workaround I fire up a command prompt and ping the mac to get it’s IP address. The user-name can now be entered in the format IPaddress\user-name with the desired result of access to my shared files.
Visually for you:
changes to
The new start menu in Vista allows you to type “cmd”+Enter after clicking the Start icon in the Taskbar which will provide you with a command prompt in which you can ping the mac target. You can still thankfully use the Windows Key+r keyboard shortcut and then type “cmd”+Enter if you prefer. Then use the name of the mac as seen in the Vista Network view as the target of the ping. For example I typed
ping macadley
and received
Pinging macadley [192.168.1.201] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 192.168.1.201: bytes=32 time=196ms TTL=64
...
So now I know the mac’s IP address and I can log on successfully. Not exactly a smooth operation but infinitely portable and non-invasive.
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11 responses so far ↓
1 Gary // Jul 7, 2008 at 3:56 pm
I am trying to accomplish the same thing you mentioned above, but no luck
2 lewis // Jul 31, 2008 at 8:48 am
i would like to know how to do that the over way around mac osx 10.4.11 to windows xp pro any awsers?
3 Matt Bracewell // Jul 31, 2008 at 9:21 am
@Gary: I’d need some more info in order to help you out.
@Lewis: Assuming you’ve set up a folder to be sharable on the XP machine hit Apple+K on your mac and type in the XP’s IP address. You’ll be presented with the available shares that you can mount. HTH
4 Nino // Aug 14, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Yes! Thanks for this tip! Thank you very much
Any idea how to do it the other way around? Mac OS connects to Windows Vista Home Edition?
Thank you
5 mayer // Oct 19, 2008 at 1:06 am
I’m using OS 10.3.9, and when I go to System Prefs > Sharing > Windows Sharing, it gives me my IP address.
When I put in my IP\username and psswd, it still says that the login was unsuccessful.
I’ve read that changing the Local Security Policy on Vista will make it work, but I have Vista Home Edition – Local Security Policy isn’t included! Any ideas?
6 Matt Bracewell // Feb 27, 2009 at 12:58 am
@mayer
If this is still a problem can you ping the mac from the Vista machine? I’ve logged on from Vista Home Basic as stated in the post title – is it safe to assume we’re talking about the same windows flavour?
Have you successfully connected anything else to your mac – is your file sharing set up and tested?
7 Ed Rowe // May 12, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Thanks. I had all the issues above. This worked for me and saved me a great deal of effort, once I realised it was a backward slash and not a solidus between the IP and the user name and the Mac wanted the short name rather than the full name of the user account
8 ron // Jun 6, 2009 at 5:13 am
it worked!! thanks so much I spent literally hours (after failing countless times in the past year) searching for solutions at millions of message boards. There is so much info it is hard to find a correct solution. Thanks for the tips.
Thankfully I don’t have to “reverse” engineer it and get my files from pc to the mac now!!
you are awesome Matt!
9 Matt Bracewell // Jun 11, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Thanks Ron. Glad the post helped you out.
10 Reuben // Sep 1, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Many thanks Matt. I was successful connecting my G5 with Windows Vista Home Premium Laptop.
11 Natacha // Jan 12, 2010 at 3:33 pm
You rock! I thankfully found your post first – your solution was perfect for me.
Thanks!
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