I find it very odd that I’m ranting about a Microsoft Windows XP issue. I rarely use XP anymore and when I do it generally just works. You don’t want to get me going about Vista (especially when it comes to “User Account Control”; I have a long post coming about that but I can’t finish it because I get too irritated every time I sit down to write it!), but I’m usually pretty happy with XP…

I have one XP machine remaining in my house. It’s a desktop machine that sits in the back corner of my basement and mostly acts as my file server. It wouldn’t be my first choice of machine for that purpose, but I’ve had it for years and it still works, so I leave it there. I’ve been using it as my iTunes server for a long time and so it was an obvious choice to use as the primary connection to my new Media Player as well (see my recent review of the Popcorn Hour PCH-A110).

The Popcorn Hour is a network connected device with an internal hard drive that mounts as a network share. It was a piece of cake to get it connected to my home network, and I was transferring files onto it within a few minutes of opening the box. It was just that easy.

Until the XP machine needed a reboot after a Windows update. That’s when XP started to annoy me. It turns out that Windows XP Home is designed not to save passwords for mapped network drives. You can connect to a drive by giving it the password when you map it, but it doesn’t keep the password after a reboot…  Every other version of XP, NT, or Vista has this capability, but XP home does not.

I had to come up with a workaround to get the machine to “remember” the password.

1. create a new file in the startup folder with a .cmd extension. I called mine connect.pch.
2. open the file in a text editor (notepad is fine)
3. add the following line of code to the file:

NET USE U: \ComputerNameShareName password user:UserName

Where U: is the desired drive letter

This file is a Windows Command File which will execute every time windows boots up.  Essentially I have created a program that will remap my drive every time the computer reboots.  It’s kludgy and it’s ugly, but it’s simple and it works.

It should be easier than this.

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