>>>5) tried to create a new user, no way. There are no users anymore, there are accounts. And for these accounts it doesn't allow any username, it has to be an email. A school email or company email or some such thing. Wow! Big brother all the way. Expect rectinal scans now if you want to play Solitaire.
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>>>More fun stuff to come unless I just give up on backup and simply ditch everything and reformat the drive.
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>>Not sure if you're talking about moving files from a W7 or W10 machine (physical or virtual). Actually, with either, solutions to most of those issues are Googleable.
>
>Thanks for proving my point. Just bare 25 years ago, networking between PCs was a piece of cake. Everything just worked, file sharing, copying, shared tables, even network-wide print queues. And the software to do that took whopping 25-50K of RAM, depending on the number of services you ran.

At that time there were some peer-to-peer networking products like LANtastic but since all clients were DOS-based none were reliable. None of them were even as good as W95 which is why they all died out. Before businesses starting getting smart and buying WinNT/2K/XP for workstations, Windows LAN networking could not be called reliable.

If memory serves it was with Win2K that MS got serious about networking. They exposed early builds to the public Internet - I think it was windows2000beta.com - and invited one and all to attack it. The results of that led to huge improvements in the MS networking stack.

Networking was "easier" back in the day because all networked computers basically had their legs spread wide open. Now that security is a little more top-of-mind, networking is more complex. Security requires reliability.

>Nowadays I'm happy if two PCs can see each other at all. If I manage to just log in from one into another, I'm amazed, and if I get to print on another box I'm ready to faint (hint: you can't share a printer unless the windows so-called firewall is active, which is not easy to google out as you don't know the cause). I've already had cases when my choices of moving a bunch of files across the room were FTP (to a server in Canada or UK) or thumb drive.
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>I don't think this is unintentional. It's so easy to get on the web, to push your stuff into them clouds, much easier than to push them across the desk.
>
>And, BTW, what eventually worked was the W7 laptop managing to open a share of the W10 (under the credentials of a newly created user) and copying those to the virtual W7 hosted in Linux, which I then moved further to the Linux itself, due to limited disk space in the virtual. Took hours. Any other combination didn't work - it wouldn't recognize the login (protocol changed again?), or it didn't have write permissions or just plain didn't see the other machine at all.
>
>Never mind, W10 is dead now. I've reinstalled the original W7 that was on that machine and will go the usual route - disable updating completely and most of the funny services, then turn the wireless on.

For lurkers, networking problems in Windows Vista or later are most commonly due to:

- Not running on a trusted/home/work network i.e. failing to select the correct option when prompted on connection to a new network

- Incorrect setup of network shares (e.g. incorrect permissions). Usually a result of manual setup and missing some settings, can usually be fixed by using the sharing wizard

- Problems with 3rd-party firewalls - disable completely while troubleshooting

- Incorrectly configured or nonexistent name resolution i.e. DNS/NetBIOS. This can usually be worked around on an ad-hoc basis by using the IP address (which doesn't require name resolution) and connecting from a CMD prompt e.g.

NET USE Z: \\192.168.1.xxx\SomeShare

- Failing to understand local machine accounts in a non-domain, peer-to-peer or heterogeneous environment, and how to access them

In your case you have extra variables e.g.

- If you want to send files from W10 directly to your Linux host, the host must run a protocol Windows understands e.g. SMB/CIFS [Samba], or run an FTP or NFS server and use appropriate client software on W10. Of course the Linux host firewall must be configured to allow client access

- When using VMs there can be foibles. For example default networking in VirtualBox is NATted so neither the host nor remote machines can see the VMs. In some configurations VirtualBox blocks PING (ICMP) so even if you have bridged networking set up you still might think you can't "see" the VMs because you can't ping them, whereas other protocols work fine