I am so frustrated - I’ve tried Netgear help, Microsoft help, and nothing works for me. I have set up a wireless Netgear router which works fine with my desktop and wireless laptop. However, I cannot figure out how to get the laptop to “see” the desktop computer and its attached printer. When I run the network setup wizard on the desktop, which puts a program on a flash drive to transfer it to my laptop, it expects my laptop to have a hard connection to the network, it doesn’t even account for the possibility that my laptop has a wireless connection. If I run the wireless setup wizard on my laptop, the opposite happens when I move the flash drive to my desktop: it expects a wireless connection, which my desktop doesn’t have. So is there no way to set up a network which has both wireless and wired connections to a router??
So I have two networks set up on the two computers but they don’t see each other. The Netgear support number connected me with someone in India who insisted I need to contact the company that made my printer!?
Let the computer handle this for you - with the sharing utilities. If you share out some of the folders on the desktop computer plus the printer, your laptop should be able to find them on the network.
Assuming you know the IP address of the desktop and that you’ve set the printer to be shared.
First, make sure the laptop can see and talk to the desktop.
On your laptop go to the start menu and select Run.
Type in CMD and click run.
You should now have a command prompt. Type 'ping ’ and the ip of the desktop and hit enter. ex: ping 192.168.1.1
You should get 4 replys. If you get request timed out, you may have firewall issues on one or both computers. Or you have the wrong IP for the desktop. Disable workstation firewalls if they’re present. They could either be windows or a third party. Nothing else will work until you can get a ping response.
Once you have gotten that part, Start menu and run again.
Type in two backslashes and the IP of the desktop and click OK. ex. \192.168.1.1
After a short while you should get and explorer screen with a few items on it including your printer. Right click on the printer and select connect. That should pull the drivers across and set it up.
Keep in mind that these are very generic instructions and that there are always a lot of if’s, and’s and but’s when dealing with computers. If this doesn’t get you there come back and let us know what is happening and any messages that it pops up when failing.