Hey guys, I am looking to set up a home network. Right now there are a few laptop in the house running either XP or Vista, and an older desktop running XP. These computers share a broadband internet connect through a wireless router.
I’d like for the laptops to be able to share files across the network, share a printer connected to the desktop, and turn the desktop into a file server for backing up documents and pictures.
What would be the easiest way for me to do this?
Make sure WEP is on, and then share your files on all the computers in a shared documents folder with full guest access enabled.
Make sure the computers can ‘see’ eachother–>
make sure they are all in the same workgroup.(r-click My Computer->Properties->computer name)
rightclick the folder you want to share, select the tab ‘sharing’, check the appropriate boxes.
You can now acces your files from other computers (assuming the ‘host’ computer is turned on) though ‘My network places’
Aside from what’s been posted you can run the ‘Network Setup Wizard’ and it should walk you through what needs to be done, do this on each machine. I fumbled through it with two desktops one running XP and one running XP-MCE2005 and a laptop running Vista. No problems, I even have the MCE machine sharing captured (tivo’d) files with the others so any pc in the house can view recorded TV. I also have the printers on the MCE machine networked so any machine can print to them.
Make sure you lock down your wireless netowork so that some gimp can’t access all the PCs in your house once they are all networked.
I am not a netork wiz by any stretch and I was able to do this in a matter of about an hour or so. The key is (like posted above) to make sure all machines are in the same workgroup.
You can also Google “XP Home Networking” and get all sorts of step by step screenshots by pros who’ve done this a million times.
If you go through all of the above and it’s still not working, temporarily disable your firewalls on all 3 machines and see if it works then. Once you’ve got it all sorted out without the firewalls, then you can go into the firewall settings and get them all to play nice with each other.
I’ve seen a lot of people drive themselves crazy trying to figure out why their network wouldn’t allow them to share things between computers, only to find out that they had everything configured properly and their firewalls were the only thing preveting it all from working.
Uninstall any Norton products, if you have them. I know I beat this drum often, but Norton products break networks more often than any other single problem I see.