Hi,

i need help from you good people with my home network (as the title would suggest ) i have an XP laptop and a windows 7 laptop and i want to be able to share the content between them both as the xp one iwll be for general use and the 7 one will be a media center type

I managed the other week to share the music library from the XP to teh 7 laptop and PS3 with out too muich difficulty but now, neither devices will see the XP machine

the 7 laptop cant ping the XP one or acess it via host name or IP address

the xp one hopwever can ping and access shares on the 7 laptop.

my phone can RDP onto both PC's using the IP address

i can only assume that it is a problem with the share settings or the fire wall on the XP laptop that is stopping proceedings as the IP's are DHCP controlled by the O2 wireless box2 router, the gateway and subnet are both matching and both are on a home network called WORKGROUP (changed to the windows default to ensure correct spelling etc...cant mess it up that way)

im using McAfee AV on both machines if you need to know this and the firewall is enableed but have the file and printer sharing set as an exception...

if anyone can suggest anything that may help me i would be very grateful

Many Thanks,

Matt

Try disabling the firewall (check Windows firewall too!) or adding an exception to the firewall rules. Windows needs certain ports opened to be discoverable on the network.

Though, this is not the best forum to ask this kind of questions. You'll find other forums where people will gladly help you with your problem.

I actually gave up trying to connect both XP and W7 to the same network and ended up making everything W7.
best move I made but obviously not ideal for everyone.

Think its going that way mate...