Home Network - Wired/Wireless - Vista to XP

[shahin92]

Hi, I was just asking for help on making a network. I have my main computer running on Vista which is connected to a Netgear 54Mbps Wireless ADSL Modem Router DG834G with ETHERNET. My second computer running on XP is connect wireless to the router with a Netgear Wireless PCI card. Now, I have managed to create internet connection to my second computer but I'm having trouble connecting the computers so they can share files as in so the second computer is able to read one of my hard disks & access it. Problem : I can't create a network where both my main computer & the secondary computer can connect to, cause one is wired & the other is wireless.

So any instructions on how to create a network connecting this two computers would be useful.

Main PC:
Intel Q6600
Gigabyte p35-dq6 mobo
8800 GTS 320MB Graphics card
2GB Ram
Vista Ultimate
Serial-ATA Harddisks

Secondary PC:
Intel pentium 4 2.66Ghz
512MB RAM
Nvidia 5600FX 128MB
IDE Harddisks Xp Pro

[J1mmy]

The ways in computers are connected to the router (wired or wireless) doesn't affect whether or not they can share files between one another.

The first thing I would check it whether they are both on the same network. You can do this by right-clicking on my computer, going under 'Computer Name' and checking what workgroup each of the computers is on. You would also come here to change the workgroup name, if they were not the same.

Since you have established an internet connection for both computers using the router, I'm not suspecting any DNS/IP error at the moment.

[Rootstonian]

I would run the network wizard on the XP box and make sure File and Printer sharing is turned on. Also, as stated above, you want the XP box to have the same Workgroup name as the Vista machine.

On Vista, I just turn on File and Printer Sharing AND Network Discovery. I think it'll (Vista) will ask you want kind of network you want and you should choose "Public". This allows other computers on your network to see each other (trust me, I just did this last weekend).

On your drive on the XP box, makes sure you share it. Then, on the Vista side, I would just map a drive letter to that share (so if you called the drive on XP, xp_shared, you would map to \\xp_computers_name\xp_shared)

Do you need to share the ENTIRE drive? Not only could this be a security risk, but depending on the size of the drive, setting permissions on all the folders could take a while