Evan Sims

Getting FolderShare for Mac to Play Nice

I’ve been using Microsoft’s FolderShare (now Windows Live FolderShare blah blah blah) service for years now, and I’ve got to admit that as much as I hate most of Microsoft’s Live apps, FolderShare is one utility that I couldn’t live without. Well, OK- I could, but I wouldn’t want to.

My recent addition of a shiny new MacBook Air to the household introduced an odd problem; while my Mac Pro has never had issues syncing files to the PCs in the house using FolderShare, the Air refused to do so. After some cursing, I did a bit of Googling and came across the solution.

Disable FolderShare encryption across all the Macs and PCs you want to sync. Yep.

Now, don’t ask me why my Mac Pro didn’t have the problem with encryption; both machines run Leopard, and neither have their Firewalls enabled. In any case, disabling encryption solves the problem, though I’m not at all a fan of the fact that my data is getting tossed around in plain text now. I suppose I could funnel everything through my Hamachi network to encrypt it, but… bleh.

Anyway, there’s the solution, Mr. Googler with a Mac. Hopefully Microsoft will fix the problem sooner rather than later, but if their track record with FolderShare updates is any indication I wouldn’t hold my breath. I’m hoping to get a Dropbox invite to see if it’s a worthy replacement. Stay tuned on that.

Resolving “Unsupported Operating System” Error in Windows Media Player 11

Fresh install of your slipstreamed Service Pack 3 media and missing Windows Media Player 11? Microsoft has yet to update the WMP11 download to support clean installs for Media Center with Service Pack 3, but here’s a fix that should work on any XP installation where you encounter the problem:

1. Download Windows Media Player 11
2. Using WinRAR, 7zip or any other archiving app that can support it, extract wmp11-windowsxp-x86-enu.exe.
3. Run wmfdist11.exe from those extracted files.
4. Run wmp11.exe, also from those files.
5. Enjoy.

Encountered this issue this afternoon, so I thought I’d share a fix. Good luck.