Home installation Lounge forum: Home Networking - Windows XP and 7

I don't know much about XP ME, but for XP Pro machines to do file sharing, file sharing must be enabled. I assume that both systems can access the Internet through your router. If not, then something more fundamental is wrong with your network.

. make sure that each XP box can see one another. This can be done by using 'ping' at the command prompt. From XP-1 do "ping XP-2" and from XP-2, do a "ping XP-1 (substitute XP-1 and XP-2 with your machine names)". If they can't 'ping by_name', then at the CMD prompt, do 'ipconfig /all'. This shows a bunch of information one being the IP address. Do this on both systems and repeat the 'ping' test but with the IP address instead of the system names. If that doesn't work, then you must have fundamental networking issues.

. Make sure that the systems belong to the same Windows Workgroup. This may not matter, but I set mine all the same anyway. Any arbitrary name can be used. Goto Control Panel > System and select the Computer Name tab and press the Change button. There, the name of the computer and the Workgroup name can be set.

. If the systems use DHCP, which they probably do, then NETBIOS will resolve machine names to network addresses. On my home network, I don't use DHCP and each system has a fixed network address. I also disable NETBIOS because native TCP file sharing is faster. If your PCs don't use DHCP, then the fix is beyond the scope of what I can tell you in this reply. It has to do with assigning IP address and editing the 'hosts' file.

. Go to Control Panel > Windows Firewall, and make sure that "File and Printer Sharing" is checked.

Then after that, file sharing should work. Just be sure to set up a share folder on your systems. In the Windows Explorer, create of mark a folder as 'shared' and see if you can actually share that folder from the other system.

Again, I don't know much about XP-ME or even XP-Home, just XP-Pro. I hope this helps you.

Here, I am running XP-Pro. I do have an XP-home edition, but it doesn't have the all things I need for an operating system. Neither does XP-Pro really. That's why I am running Linux 64 bit (Ubuntu V10.04). Under it, I run VirtualBox then run XP-Pro in virtual machine for the times I do need Windows. ME may be even more limited than XP-Home Edition. In XP-Home, the only mode for file sharing is "Simple File Sharing" (an option under the file Explorer > Tools > Folder Options). There is a way to do advanced file sharing (sharing an entire partition and other things) is by starting XP-Home in recovery mode and change some things, but I've never messed with it to be honest. I've never had a chance to get frustrated over ME.

I am in a similar position to you. I maintain 5 systems at home all of them but one is XP, thank goodness. Actually I do have XP on my main system, but I seldom use it - I've switched to ubuntu Linux v10.04 - and I almost exclusively run it. I do keep a bootable XP partition just in case I need real Windows. For things that do in XP, I run XP in a virtual machine provided by VirtualBox under Linux.

I am currently messing around with my own DNS and DHCP servers for my home LAN. Right now, I am using fixed IP addresses on my machines so they can find each other. My goal is to go DHCP for everything but I have to integrate the DHCP server with my DNS server.

Keep you hair - I lost mine years ago (hereditary). Just keep taking your meds!

Tom

I think the OP means XP MCE (Media Center Edition). But that isn't really clear indeed. For all purposes, it's equal to XP Professional.

Kees