Not sure where you are pulling that number from, but I am not disagreeing with your notion that we need to support Windows Xp as it is still a large percentage of the market. Recent reports show that it is under 50% of the market now, with Windows 7 coming on fast (as well as Mac OSX).
We recently did a user survey of My Book Live users and of the respondents that replied to the survey, 39% were Windows XP users.
Again, if you don’t mind, help reply to the question I asked. This will help us in trying to resolve your issue.
The question was.
When you press the “open in Explorer” button, does the Dialog box pop up only once? or does it pop up ever time you press the OK button? As I mentioned, we have never seen this issue, so if it goes into a continues loop, we need to get to the issue why this happens. It should only appear ONCE per session. It should still allow you to use the funtion.
The reason I asked some of the router questions was to help you in trying to get it to work. We do our best to make this as easy as possible for consumers, but sometimes it does require you to make modifications to your router setup to get a connection to the outside world.
Tony
Edit:
I saw your reply. I have notifed our dev team. First step is to try to reproduce this. I may need to get more detailed system information from you.
Just finished talking to our developer. With Windows Xp, you MUST use port 80 to communicate over. Windows Xp does not allow any other port for WebDAV to operate on, so if Port 80 is blocked or assigned to something else, this popup will occur. What the confusion is over is the language we put in the popup. It should have been more descriptive in telling you what to do to help solve this. I’ll work on this language for the next release.
In the meantime, you will need to look at your router, and this is only on your home network. You will need to either disable uPnP or map the external port 80 to the internal My Book Live IP address (port 80). Once you do this, disable remote access on the My Book Live, then reanble remote access.
We do our best to work around the limitations of the Windows Xp OS, and as I said earlier, you will have to do some manual tweaking here.
Okay. I mapped to port 80 and that did not solve the problem. I disabled UPNP and that seem to fix the problem. Don’t know if it was the combination of the two or not. I suspect most people would not even know how to connect to their router, let alone change the settings. Regardless, I’m glad that I finally got someone that could help me with this. If I would have known how many hours it would take to finally happen, I would have never started. Hopefully you will have a ready answer to other users, now.
Thank you.
Ed
(I hope disabling UPNP will not give me other problems. It must be on by default for a reason.)
Glad to see you got it to work and agreed - this is not a very user friendly experience. We already have something that will help this issue in the works. A software release coming up will not require you to turn off uPnP. There will be a setting for Windows XP compatibility. It will tell you to either forward ports 80/443 to your My Book Live or default to relay mode automoatically. This would have solved your issue.
Again, I apologize that you had so many issues and hope that you will continue to look to WD for your storage products.
I did a firmware update last night & tried it again from work this morning (Windows XP Professional SP3). It came up with a message saying it would only work on Vista or higher but, despite that, it worked absolutely fine.
So, finally, thank you very much for listening & responding.
I know this thread is a little old, but I’m having the same problem with remote access from Windows XP machines described, albeit not a loop; I just get to the end of the process and Java won’t connect to the drive. Of course, I haven’t tested it on an XP machine, but just Vista and Windows 7, which explains a lot. It also, by the way, works fine from my Kindle.
In as simple terms as possible, are you saying that to access the My Book Live remotely with XP, I need to disable UPNP on my router and follow the directions you gave in this thread to open port 80? Will that make it work?
The problem’s come back again! After months of being to access my home external HD from work, I can’t do it any more. I’ve recently done a firmware upgrade - do I need to tick an “XP compatibility” box somewhere?
