kate_nepveu

Someone needs to write a third party client that makes LJ look like Usenet.

That would be nice. Probably impossible, but nice.

Getting Himself's old XP computer and my new Vista one to see each other's shared folders wasn't a big problem.

On the other hand, we eventually had to give up on getting my computer permission to use his printer, which had been a no-brainer back when we were both running XP. Fortunately, when we got the previously-shared HP deskjet we didn't throw out the el rauncho cheapo Epson printer I'd bought back when our old Okidata laser printer died the final death during one of our stony-broke periods, so I was able to hook the Epson up to my machine.

We currently have no working printer, so that at least is an obstacle we will face another day.

I assure you that I am overjoyed to hear that file and printer sharing do not always go hand-in-hand.

Ooh! That would be cool. I think I hadn't realized you could do that.

The Elder Son was of the opinion that it might have worked to connect the Deskjet directly to the local network via the router, rather than having it connected to Himself's printer. But since we had the spare Epson, we went with it instead, on the grounds that while the best-case outcome of the Elder Son's suggestion would be a shared printer, the worst-case outcome might turn out to be a printer that neither of us could see at all, and we'd end up having to scrape the local network back down to bare metal and set everything up again from scratch.

we'd end up having to scrape the local network back down to bare metal

That would be bad, yes.

Possibly we'll use the intermediate step of not sharing the printer and just dragging files into the shared folders for the person upstairs to print.

I should warn you, I have two XP laptops (one original, one MCE) linked on a home network and the shared folders enjoy disappearing from Network Places with erratic regularity. Sometimes the network will be inaccessible from one computer, but fine on the other. Or it only works on one user account. Or--you get the idea.

Thanks for the warning. In less than twenty-four hours, the only problem has been that one of the laptops went to sleep, but I'll keep an eye on it.

Do you remember how you got the Vista computer to see the XP? I've been able to get the XP to see both Vista and 2000, but neither the Vista nor 2000 can get into the XP - they see it, but it won't let them in.

Well, I installed this patch on the XP computers:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922120

But you've probably already done that, and I don't know that it would be the problem with the 2000.

Other than that, honestly, I did so much stuff that I'm not sure I can remember all of it. Some things I do remember:

* The Vista machine, confusingly, needed to be configured to *not* be a "public" network, because "public" = coffeeshop = higher security. I think it did, anyway.

* The Vista machine turned out to be using a third-party firewall that required configuration.

* I had to add the IP range of the networked machines to ZoneAlarm on my XP machine.

* I'm not sure whether I had to do anything to the Windows firewall on the other XP machine.

* The Vista machine and one of the XP machines were logged in to accounts with the same name, but one of them had a password to the account and the other didn't, which appeared to cause the machines to not prompt for a username/password to access the other, but they wouldn't connect because the passwords weren't the same. Adding the same password to the XP machine fixed this.

* I enabled file sharing for the Vista machine while it was on a wireless connection, and then when I docked it, had to enable it again for the Ethernet connection.

Umm, that's all I remember now.

Thanks! I'll look at it when I get home. :D