Networking Vista and XP?

First I should say I've never created a home network to share files or folders, but I never thought it would be this difficult. Here's what I've got, a new Gateway notebook with Vista Home Premium and a desktop running XP Media Center Edition, The wireless router that serves the Gateway is a D-link DI-524 and the desktop is wired to the D-link via ethernet cable.





I spent about 3 hours attempting either machine to see eah other with no effort. Does the network need to be initiated from the Vista machine or the XP machine. I would have thought it would have been as easy as following simple directions with in the networking sections of the software but nothing but problems are occuring.





I was hoping someone could do an EASY to follow, step by step to walk me through it. I called help numbers for the router, Microsoft and Gateway and all wanted to provide help via pay per minute type BS. I believe there are firewalls (probably Vista FW on the Gateway and AOL 9.0 FW on the Desktop)

Networking Vista and XP?
There are many possibilities - I'll tackle the simplist for now. First off, BOTH machines can access the internet just fine, correct? And - you DO have folders shared on one/both systems I assume.





Assuming both answers are yes -





Most likely your problem is one of security. Both XP and Vista require user authentication. IE - Go into your Contro Panel -%26gt; User Accounts. Ensure that both machines have the same user and password information. Once that is done, you should be able to see the shares. One way of trying this instead of using the network neighborhood is to try Start-%26gt;run... and enter something like the following, "\\TheOtherPC\MySharedFolderIWantToAcces... and see if it works.. Sometimes, on a first-time share, NN(Netword neighborhood) can take up to 10 minutes to actually 'detect' shares out there.. Try that and report back :)
Reply:turn off both firewalls and check to see if they see each other first. if they see the other one it will be your firewall settings. post back after trying this to let us know.
Reply:Both computers get the internet?





right click XP's my computer icon and choose properties%26gt;computername tab%26gt;change button%26gt; re-type the workgroup name to something else%26gt;click ok%26gt;restart to accept changes.





do the same for vista its a little different, Open the Control Panel, open System, and then click Advanced System Settings in the left column.


Click the Computer Name tab in the System Properties window and then click Change.


By default your computer is set to the workgroup named workgroup. Simply erase workgroup and name your workgroup as the same as you did on your xp machine. Click OK. You'll have to restart your computer to accept changes.
Reply:First right click my computer on each machine (Computer on Vista) and set simple computer names and a simple workgroup name. Open the exception for file and printer sharing on both. Right click any folders or shares that you want to expose to the network and set sharing. On the Vista machine go to the tcp/ip properties and click advanced. Select the wins tab and turn on always use netbios over tcp/ip. Turn off use lmhosts. It may take up to 20 minutes, but the machines should now appear in the network browser. They may not be accessible without setting identical user and password information on each machine.