Olympus-OM
[Top] [All Lists]

[OM] [OT] Win XP networking advice needed

Subject: [OM] [OT] Win XP networking advice needed
From: Chuck Norcutt <chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:24:04 -0400
My wife has finally returned from our UK adventure.  She arrived back 2 
weeks later than me since she was traveling with her girl friend on the 
Queen Mary II rather than flying.

She had taken our Dell laptop computer with her.  The laptop, along with 
my Dell desktop, constitutes our household Win XP local network.  I 
replugged the laptop back into the same wired router connection it had 
before it left, internet access came right back and I thought I was done.

Then she complained that she couldn't print something.  Ah, how stupid 
of me.  While she was gone my ancient Brother laser printer had run out 
of toner and I decided that the drum unit probably wasn't far behind. 
Time for a new laser printer.  I replaced the old Brother laser printer 
with a newer model and all was well.  But I had forgotten to uninstall 
the old printer driver and install a new one on the laptop after she got 
home.  No problem.  Install the new driver.  No dice, no printing.

After some head scratching I finally realized that the real problem was 
that the two computers were not communicating over the network at all. 
I suppose there could yet be a problem with the printer installation but 
I haven't gotten that far yet.

I reran the setting up of a local network on both machines and verified 
that file and printer sharing were enabled and the firewall was set to 
allow that.  The end result was:  The laptop can see that the desktop is 
on the network as part of the workgroup but can't access it.  However, 
although the desktop knows the name of the workgroup it complains that 
it can't access it at all. It doesn't even see that the laptop exists as 
part of the workgroup let alone access it.

Running local network trouble shooting surprised me by asserting that it 
thought the trouble might be a conflict of duplicate names.  Well that 
certainly wasn't true but I changed the computer's name just to force a 
change.  Still no help.

And now I'm stuck.  I haven't a clue about how to proceed.

ps:  A final data point.  I had a related problem some time ago where 
the laptop couldn't communicate with the desktop unless it logged on to 
it with the desktop's password.  That had something to do with having 
not enabled a guest account which I had disabled thinking a guest 
account without a password was dangerous.  I'm still not sure about that 
one.  Supposedly something obscure about XP networking.  But I'm not 
even getting that far since I'm not being prompted for a password.  Once 
side can't access what it can see and the other side can't even see what 
it needs to access.  Ideas please!

Chuck Norcutt
-- 
_________________________________________________________________
Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>
Sponsored by Tako
Impressum | Datenschutz