Befuzzled by home network problem

Mr. CooL ICE

I was asked to a friends house to solve a problem with the network they have in the house. Basically, they have eircom broadband but replaced the Netopia router with a different one because a laptop in the house only has 802.11b wireless. Basically, two of them wanted to be able to share files between their computers, both of which are wireless. For ease of explaining, the laptop is called hoff and the other is called delta.

Basically, hoff can see his own and delta's shared folders but delta can only see its own shared folders. Therefore, i can ping delta from hoff, but i cant ping hoff from delta. This makes no sense to me at all. Neither computers have a .169 IP address; they have .2 and .3 respectively. I looked at the settings on the router, and there was nothing out of the ordinary. The two lads have very limited knowledge of computers and claim they never messed around with anything like the settings TCP/IP settings on either computer.

Any ideas for what I could do to solve this?

wind00ze

Hey, make sure they are both on the same workgroup by right clicking my computer and selecting properties, then under the "computer name" tab ensure they are both on the same one. Hope that helps.

Mr. CooL ICE

Thanks for the response, but that was actually the first thing i checked. Even if they werent in the same workgroup, being able to ping one from the other and not the other way around wouldnt explain the problem.

BigEejit

windows xp built in firewall on the one that can see both shares