Vista Upgrade Part 3

My new Brother MFC-7820N multifunction printer arrived today. Although I had never used a networked printer before (as distinct from a printer hooked to a PC being shared by a PC on a network), the setup went fairly smoothly. The only hiccup was when the printer wasn’t autodetected. The problem was relatively easily solved by setting the printer’s DHCP settings to "DHCP" instead of automatic. Printing and scanning both work fine from Vista. Once shared from Vista, the printer was also easily be added to any XP Pro machine on our home network.

[Note this update on printer installation.]

I had been having some problems with blurry fonts in some apps. That problem is gone today. I’m note sure whether its is a result of tuning the ClearType settings or installing the latest nVidia drivers yesterday, but after a reboot today, the problem was gone.

Thanks to a response to my post in the Vista newsgroup, I was told that Vista search can have access to indices of files on a network share by installing Windows Desktop Search on the machine hosting that share. Evidently Vista search and Windows Desktop search running on different machines all communicate with one another. The search service running on each machine is responsible for indexing the files on that machine and responding to queries that come in automatically from other machines. This seems like a great architecture. So I set that up on my BS 2003 box and set it to indexing. I haven’t tried it out yet as I figured I would give it a while to index the my files first.