saiya00

I bought a crossover cable a few months go and attempted to set up a temporary network with my laptop and desktop PC to save myself the time of transferring a huge chunk of data via CDs. It worked, but was very finnicky and sometimes the computers just wouldn't see each other.

Well, I'm trying to do the same thing now, with a different PC (both my laptop and the PC are running Windows XP Home), so that I can back up my files for a system restore. Neither computer sees the other one, and I've tried everything from running the network wizard several with different options selected, restarting both computers numerous times, and unplugging and plugging the cable.

I know little to nothing about networking, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Help!!

~Saiya

randruff

First of all, turn off all firewalls on every computer......then run windows networking ( i know you said you did, but try it again). The important part is to make sure every computer is in the same workgroup. let us know if you have any luck!

Also, are you 100% it is a crossover cable?

shakoush2001

I think that the best way to know if the computer are connected is as follows ( I know you are a network newbie but you can always learn):
Lets call your desktop PC "A" and your Laptop "B":
Turn on A and B in each of the computers go to start->run ( type in "cmd"), you will get a black window, in each of A and B type ipconfig you will get a few lines of words and numbers like those below :
Ethernet adapter local:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.10.254
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : fe80::**********
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . :

The first line is what you really need it is the IP address of each computer, suppose that A & B are connected, you need to type in at computer A inside the black window "ping 192.168.10.254" without the quotation marks and replacing 192.168.10.254 with the IP of computer B "which would be number in hte first line after typing ifconfig inside the console in computer B". If you get hte following response:
C:\Documents and Settings\scream>ping 192.168.10.6

Pinging 192.168.10.6 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 192.168.10.6: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.10.6: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.10.6: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.10.6: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128

Ping statistics for 192.168.10.6:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms

Then everything seems allright and you really should only put both computers in the same workgroup, to do that right click on "My Computer"-> Computer Name-> Change "To change this compute name and domain etc"

seriously_confused

okay i have a ME and XP, they're connected by a wired belkin router by ethernet. i pinged on the XP and everything was fine but when i pinged on the ME the packets were lost. wazz the problem.

techtony

Win ME will allow unauthenticated PCs to transfer packets, but XP won't. You have to create a user on the XP machine. Best to user user ID and password that you use to log onto the ME machine.