Windows Networking Question

Factual Questions
1

I don’t think that I irrevocably damaged my girlfriend’s PC but I feel guilty about messing it up and I turn to other more knowledgeable Dopers to help me out.

I bought a laptop running Windows XP Pro and I have that one running on a small home network with 2 other desktops (I just can’t get rid of a faithful but slow PC!).

We had a great idea to connect my laptop to her laptop with a crossover cable so we could play PC games. Her laptop is for work, runs Windows 2000 and is connected to her work domain.

I ran the home networking wizards on both laptops and they still couldn’t recognize each other. After much tweaking I finally sealed my fate, I thought that the problem was that in the Connections tab, she was not a member of a workgroup but of her work domain. I removed her from her domain (big mistake) and added her to the MSHOME workgroup.

We still couldn’t connect. We gave up on the connection idea. She bought her own desktop anyways…

Here’s the issue. I wanted to undo all the damage I had done but I could not put her back on the original domain. She took her laptop back to work and had the IT try to guy do it. The IT guy says that he could not get the laptop to recognize the network.

Did I really mess up her PC? Can anyone give me a guide as to how to get the network to recognize her PC or is this an issue that you just have to know about the network configuration?

Also, are there any good resources I could learn about Windows networking?

2

Did the IT guy make certain that the TCP-IP settings were configured for the office LAN? If you configured TCP-IP to automatically obtain an IP address on your home network it could definitely cause a problem on an office network that requires fixed IP addresses.

3

Sorry for your troubles. There’s nothing worse than telling your girlfriend that you can fix it only in her eyes to have messed it up ever more !

Firstly, I really don’t think that you could have done any harm to her computer that can’t be corrected, hopefully by the people from SD;

I used the guide here to teach me stuff about networking windows machines.

Honestly, unless you dropped the thing on the ground I’d wonder why that guy actually has a job as an IT guy in the first place !

4

Just for future reference and for anyone else that might be reading this thread, when you want to do this sort of thing, create a new user account! That way, she can be one user at work and a different user at home and the two won’t conflict with each other.

This approach can also be tried as a last resort to get her going again at work. Plug into the network, create a new user account and run the Windows Networking Wizard.