12 Web Notes

Few weeks ago, for first time installing Windows Vista I have been impressed by some of its new features and user friendly interface. As I wrote in my first post about it “First impressions from Windows Vista” all major applications are working fine after the upgrade from XP to Vista. However, being not able to check all functions and features at the very beginning, last week I found an application that is not working as expected. It is specialized software for ship design that may work with local projects set on the local hard disk or with network based projects located on different PC that can be either server connected to the LAN either remote machine located somewhere in Internet. Testing this application in local environment first without any single problem, when I try to connect to LAN based project server it refused my request. The server could not be found, say the error message box. Further investigating the problem, checking the network functionality everything seems to be all right with the PC configuration. Checking Vista build in firewall for blocking some network ports, but it was switched off. Hence, the firewall should not affect the network functionality. However, although the firewall status was reported “OFF” I was not able to open its configuration panel. Related services were not able to start too.
There was almost nothing else to be done at Vista configuration side but only to reinstall it again. So I started its installation disk again with the hope that there would be some “repair” options. Vista installation started and followed exactly the same procedure as the first time when I upgraded the old Windows XP installation. No repair operating system option offered. Just plain upgrade installs. It again took a few hours to complete the installation and there was the same requirement about 17 GB free disk space in order to start the installation. The good news is that after doing the second upgrade I have got my application working in client – server mode now. But what was the problem? Analyzing the upgrade history from XP to Vista and the involved procedures and application, I strongly believe that the problem was caused by Symantec Firewall application. Initially there was Symantec Client Security installed on Windows XP. It consists of two main parts; Symantec Antivirus 10.0 Corporate Edition and Symantec Firewall applications. After upgrading from XP to Vista, the antivirus application stopped working. Symantec provides new version Symantec Antivirus 10.20 Corporate Edition which is compatible with Vista. Before installing this application, I uninstalled the old Client Security applications including both; the antivirus and the firewall application. Hence, Symantec firewall was not able to restore the original Windows firewall functionality, because meanwhile Windows version was changed from XP to Vista after Symantec has been installed on this PC. That should be the reason of the strange network related problems, I think.
In short, to avoid such or similar problems, if you are going to install Vista as an upgrade on existing Windows installation where third party antivirus and/or firewall application is installed, it is strongly recommendable first to uninstall them both; the antivirus and the firewall. To play safe, you might consider disconnecting your PC from Internet during the installation, because there will be neither antivirus protection nor firewall protection while the installation process complete.

If you remember, I mentioned earlier in this post that there is the same requirement for 17GB free disk space to be available for starting Vista installation again. Hence, it is advisable also to plan your hard disk size and partitioning in such a way, so to ensure that there always will be at less 20 – 25 GB free disk space available for maintenance purposes. It is good to have plenty of free disk space also when disk defragmenter is running. Fighting to allocate the required free disk space I found a new feature included in Windows Vista. Read more about it in my next post about Windows Vista Disk Management: “Shrink volume” and “Extend volume” facility.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 17th, 2007 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.