Windows 7 addendum: Homegroup idiocy

[ellarien]

Win7 has something called "Homegroups" which is supposed to let you share your files with other Win7 computers on the same home network, with a special password. The stupid thing about this? At least for my situation (one person, many computers of various vintages and operating systems) good old-fashioned filesharing on the network works just fine for that. I'd got[ten] used to the convenience of having (password-protected, but that's mostly transparent) write-access to the files on the desktop from whichever laptop happened to be in use in the living room. (Except the little Eee, which was so intermittent and flaky about it that I eventually threw in the towel and resorted to what we used to call "sneakernet" at work, though in my case it was usually slippernet or barefootnet; put the file on a removable medium and walk over to the destination computer with it.)

Homegroups, it turns out, doesn't let me do that. Once the silly thing was set up, I suddenly found that I could only see the files on the desktop that Windows thought I should be allowed to see -- and only with read-access, and organized by libraries. (I told you libraries were evil.) The XP machine, meanwhile, could read and write everything just fine.

The solution? Leave Homegroup, on both Win7 machines. Then I'm back where I was before, with full access to all my own files, not just the ones in stupid "Libraries." (ETA, with added growling: but I had to share the printers manually, and add them again.)

So what exactly was the point?


I'm a PC, but Windows 7 I'm having second thoughts about.

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Windows 7 I'm having second thoughts about

When the public beta came in, we had a number of users who switched; and by the time Win7 proper was rolled out, some of them had already switched back. XP appears to be still a popular choice for new computers.

[ellarien]

Win7 was hyped as the XP to Vista's ME, but so far I'm not convinced. XP may have been the best thing they ever produced, and people have been getting comfortable with it for nearly a decade. The only thing I don't like is its tendency to bog down over time, so that a machine that was perfectly workable when new needed a serious memory upgrade to be tolerable three years later. I'm not sure whether it's the patches or the overwhelming weight of the necessary anti-malware, but it's a pain.

Win7 ... well, we'll see. I'm pondering whether I dare try a canned registry hack to rid my desktop of the Homegroups and Libraries icons, but it seems a bit risky.