Windows Network Hell

Windows Network Hell

Having problems getting multiple computers to talk to each other?

I have two XP Windows machines, a Vista laptop, a Mac mini, and a MacBook Pro I wish to network.

Sunthar summarizes some of the setup steps on this post.

For me, these were the important things I needed to do:

  1. Make sure all computers are using the same work group. WORKGROUP seems to be the best one to use that is also mac friendly.
  2. In the sharing properties for the folders I want to share,  added EVERYONE to the list of people I wanted to give permissions to. Made sure I selected FULL permissions.
  3. In  Vista,  in Network & Sharing  Center, I made sure that Network Discovery, and File Sharing was ON. I turned on Public Folder Sharing and set  it to  FULL sharing.   Go HERE for an excellent step by step with screen shots.
  4. On  XP machines, I installed the Link Layer Topology Discovery Responder(LLTD).

Sunthar's post and the the linked article and threads include many more troubleshooting suggestions.  It's not for the faint of heart.  I wish I could say that there is a simple or definitive solution but there isn't.  You have to try different things and see what works for you.  The above four steps were all I needed to ADD (who knows what I've done on EACH machine in the past to prepare it to be networked).

Good luck.

On a newly created XP machine, when I went to share a folder it reported that sharing had been turned off and I would have to run Network  Setup to enable this feature.  I did.  Still couldn't login to the PC.  I then ran across this which did the trick:

One other solution which a lot of people miss is that you can not log onto, nor see the shares of, a target PC unless you have at least ONE folder shared on the target. Once you set up the share, on the source PC you will see the target's printers folder plus the shared folder.

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