There are four computers in the house: my pc (running win7), living room pc (running XP), one roomie’s pc (running XP), and other roomie’s laptop (running linux, I think.)
My pc and living room pc are plugged physically into a router. Roomie’s pc and other roomie’s laptop connect to the router wirelessly.
My pc and the laptop are not involved in what I want to do. The living room pc has a bunch of movies that roomie wants to watch in his room on his pc. So I want to network living room pc and roomie’s pc so they can share files, excluding the other two computers.
As I said, one pc is physically plugged into the router, and the other connects wirelessly to the router. They are both running XP. I followed the instructions in windows for doing this (on both pcs), but no joy. Is there some problem with the way the computers are connected that prevents them from connecting together?
Also, if these two are connected into a workgroup with a separate name (“workgroup”), will that supercede or interfere with the shared internet connection (also a network) that the two wireless computers are using to connect to the internet through the router? If not, can the one roomie’s pc be connected to the workgroup and the router’s wireless network at the same time? (or will we have to combine them?)
The type of connection (Wired vs. wireless) *should be *irrelevant, assuming that all of the machines are receiving IP addresses from a DHCP server built into the router, which is pretty much standard. Both machines need to belong to the same Workgroup, and your roommate needs to have an account on the living room PC with the same account name and password that he has on his own PC. If all that’s in place, and you’ve shared out the folder in question on the living room PC, it should “just work”.
You say that you’ve “followed the instructions”, and that there’s “no joy”; can you expand on that? What specifically have you done, and what are the symptoms of the problem (error messages, etc.)?
Win 7 is the culprit. I am almost tempted to say switch the media drives from the 7 to the living room xp box. This is also a problem with 8/8.1 and will probably be a problem with 10.
First you find the folder that you want to share, in 7 as you probably know, you cant share the actual drive, has to be a folder(s). Now you want to create a new user, if you have not done so, this will be named “everyone” without the quotes.
Now goto control panel > Networking and sharing center > change advanced sharing settings , which will be on the left.
Goto Guest or public, assuming you have already turned on network discovery, turned on file and print sharing
Now on to All networks
Public folder sharing > turn on
Password protected sharing
turn off password protected sharing.
Otherwise, you can see the stuff, but it will pop up a password box.
IF this has already been done, then I can’t help any more. This has worked for me.