Windows Vista Vista networking problem

Hi everyone - what a great service you are offering, I hope I too can help someone with a problem down the track. Meanwhile I have one which I can't work out. My wife has a new laptop (Sony Viao) running Vista and I have a fairly new PC on which I have just installed Vista. We can both access the internet through my ADSL gateway/router and after much frustration and fiddling, I can now see her shared folders and use her printer. However I cannot get my PC to be accessible on the Laptop. I have shared, re-shared, assigned passwords, deleted passwords... When I try to log into my PC from her laptop it asks for a user name & password. I didn't have a password on my administrator account on my PC so I set one up . However this doesn't work although the reverse scenario does - ie I can log on to her Laptop using her user account & password. Any help would be much appreciated - at the moment we are trudging back & forth with memory sticks just to print!
Geoff

 

Some thoughts...

Do you both have the same Service Pack? I had problems before I got SP1.

In Control Panel -> Network and Sharing Center, is everything set for sharing (or at least that the settings are matching). Is Public Folder sharing and Printer Sharing turned on (you don't say)?

Do you use Windows Firewall? If you have a security suite with a firewall, make sure Windows Firewall is turned off. Maybe try disconnecting from the internet and turn the firewalls off.

Make sure the printer is set to "shared" (I'm winging here, because I don't have a printer connected to mine). On the remote computer go to Control Panel -> Printers and run the Add Printer wizard. If you can't find it by the search, use the host printing computer's name or IP address. (Do you know how to find those?)

Matt

 

Hey thanks for taking the time to help Matt.

Your comments are all spot on but in the interim I have solved the problem.

I'm new to this group so I'm not sure what the etiquette is - should I/can I remove my original post so as not mto waste anyone else's time who might want to help, or do I leave my posting there in case it helps someone else who might have a similar problem?

In the end, my problem was that I thought I had assigned permissions to the 'Guest' account on my shared drive but I didn't go that last step and click ADD after selecting!

The reason it threw me was that for some reason I didn't have to do any of that for the other Vista machine. That is, networking worked straight away without having to muck around with passwords and permissions from desktop to laptop but getting it to work in the reverse direction was the problem...

 

Thanks Arie