Networking Laptop and Home PC

Doug - I see why you were having problems. Bunch of 'gotcha' items here.

Description . : National Semiconductor Corp. DP83815/816 10/100 MacPhyter PCI Adapter

This sounds like a network card for use on a wired network. If you go into your networking section and get into properties for the card (usually a right-click on the icon will give you the option you need), you will find an option to disable it. Do that. The PC will then ignore it but if you need it at some point later, all you have to do is enable it. The network wizard should run without barking at you after this (disabling) is done.

Now for setting XP to require a username/password logon (and note that I'm only 1st hand familiar with XP-pro so if this is a situation where XP-home does things differently and my directions don't work, post back)

- start~run~control userpasswords2
- make sure the box is checked to require user logon
- click the advanced tab then advanced user management and open the users folder. Make sure your user account has a password. If not, add one. Remember that they are case sensitive and that the logon name/password must be an exact match to the one you use on the ME PC.

After this, the remaining sharing items from the earlier post should work.

 

I disabled the card, no problem; then tried sharing the folder again.

I got the following error message while running the Network Setup Wizard:

Cannot Complete the Network Setup Wizard

An error occurred during the configuration of the network on this computer.

You can configure your network manually, or you can run the wizard again with different settings.


To close this wizard, click Finish.

 

Doug - this is getting more and more strange.

Get the laptop onto the internet and use RAV (from my signature) to do a complete virus scan of the PC.

If that comes out clean or if you find problems, fix them, and things still aren't working, get a fresh start with TCP/IP on the laptop. With XP you cannot remove and reinstall but you can come close.

start~run~cmd to open a command window and then
netsh int ip reset c:\tcpipreset.txt
exit to close the window.

In device manager, delete your network cards. Then reboot and reinstall them and set things up again. Hopefully the wizard will work for you. If not, easy enough to do it manually. (I say "easy enough" but that hasn't been the case so far. Still, I keep hoping. )

 

FYI ... On my laptop the box to click into to share a folder became accessable after the "failed" wizard attempt. I checked it, and then followed the rest of your instructions. After that, when I went to
start ~my network places
All my shared folders from PC-B (desktop) were there !! I cannot gain access to any though, as it says

\\pc-b\test-b is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the adminstrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions.

The network path was not found.

On my desktop (PC-B) no share files are shown. And honestly newt, I have no idea how long the folders have been in "My network places "; as this is the first time I looked there. (I was going there to quadruple check that my workgroup names were identical. - they are.

 

Oh, I didn't see you had posted before my last one. I will try that.

Question though.
Will getting a "fresh start" effect anything else (IE. Internet connection) ? Wondering because, it took me a while to get that correctly set up with the wireless router.

Also, I did not buy a seperate Network Card - is that something I needed

(Just trying to think here on my end too; I probably shouldn't though ... you're the expert !)