Basic wireless networking question

I’m trying to setup a simple wireless home network and seem to have hit a roadblock. I even purchased the “Networking for Dummies” book and can’t seem to get things working. :frowning: While I am not uber technical by any stretch, I have successfully setup local LAN networks in the past without any problems. I tried using MS Windows help but that hasn’t helped either. The desktop is running XP and the laptop is running Vista.

Here’s my problem:

We moved to an apartment and switched from DSL to cable modem. I was able to hook up my cable modem directly to my desktop PC and it worked perfectly. I then fired up my D-Link wireless router and plugged my cable modem into it. After make a few minor adjustments I got everything working via wireless. So my desktop PC and home laptop both can wirelessly get out to the internet without any issues. I have an HP C3100 printer hooked up directly to my desktop PC. It works just fine from the PC.

My goal is two fold:

  1. To be able to share my desktop’s C drive with my laptop so I can easy transfer files back and forth

  2. To be able to print from my laptop to the HP printer that is local to my desktop

I have done all of the usual things to share the drive and printer, have created guest user accounts, made sure they are both in the same workgroup etc. but my laptop still can’t see the desktop’s drive or printer. In fact it can’t see the desktop PC at all. I have officially run out of ideas.

Is there a simple primer somewhere that can show me how to diagnose the problem I am having?

Have you actually chosen to share the drive and printer?

Another link of interest: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/813936/en-us

Thanks… that’s a good place to start.

I remember that the one time I tried to do this with my XP systems I had a hell of a time. I had to run something from the command line to get the printer to share out correctly. I eventually gave it up as too much of a pain in the ass. Rather I’d suggest just getting a wireless print server and be done with it.

Good Luck! I’ll see if I can find the steps that I had to go through someplace. Although it’s been a few years since I messed with it.

It might be buried in those Microsoft articles somewhere, but one thing you’ll need to check is that, if you have a firewall enabled, there are firewall exceptions set up for File and Printer Sharing. I recently had to talk my father-in-law through this, and he had a 3rd party firewall that I was unfamiliar with, so it was a bit difficult. He was using McAfee, and the magic words were a button labeled something like “I trust other computers on my network to share files and printers.” If you’re using the standard XP firewall, there is an “exceptions” tab and “File and Printer Sharing” is the exception you need to enable. On the Vista built-in networking setup, the magic incantation is to change the network type to “private network” (which seems backward at first, but it refers to the fact that it’s your network, not the network at the coffee shop, so it’s safe to trust other computers on it).