Home Wireless Network - 2 XP, 1 Vista laptops

Tinytony

Hi guys,

Just wondering if someone would be able to help me on this? I recently set up workgroup between two laptops at home. Both machines (one Dell, one HP) were both running Windows XP and after some initial teething problems, I got this working correctly and could share files between the two laptops. All well and good.

But now another lad in the house has bought a windows vista machine and I can not get his machine fully integrated to our workgroup. He can connect to the dell macine but not the HP machine and neither the dell or Hp machine can connect to the vista one.

His machine shows up within the workgroup on my machine but when I try to connect to it I get a message saying "You do not have permission to use this network resource. Please contact the server administrator".

Anybody any ideas on why we can't access the vista machine? I've tried the suggestions on the Microsoft website, making network private, turning on file sharing etc but no joy.

Any help appreciated........

ethernet

Could be a firewall blocking it. You can try turning off firewalls temporarily as you troubleshoot.

Also, on Vista, make sure the network has been set to being for home. Have a poke around the Network and Sharing Centre and make sure all is in order there.

Tinytony

Hey, thanks for that ethernet.

I actually resolved this at the weekend and it was a firewall issue. It was linked to McAfee on the Vista machine. I had to specify the IP addresses of the machines individually as it didn't seem to recognize the ip range I had set it to allow. (Ya ya Mcafee I know!! - not my machine!!)

Although the Vista machine still can't access one of the XP machines. My own my machine can access both of the other machines though so I'm not going to bother troubleshooting it

Thanks for the reply.

ethernet

Bloody McAfee. I had the same problem when setting up our home network. Norton was blocking every -- good and bad -- without any indication. If I had my way, I'd take it off that particular PC but I'm not allowed! All's working now though.

You say you added individual IP addresses to the firewall, marking them as allowed/safe. Could you add an IP range instead? That's what I did with Norton. I've set 192.168.0.0-192.168.0.255 as allowed. That way, you won't need to add any more individual IP addresses to firewalls if you add more PCs [that's if they're all in the same subnet but they probably will be, especially if you have a DHCP server on the network].

Tinytony

That was the weird thing, I had added the range and it seemed to be enabled, but when I turned off the McAfee firewall I was able to connect, but when I turned it back on I wasn't. But once I added the individual addresses (the same way as I had specified the range) I was able to connect ok.

ethernet

Tinytony wrote:

That was the weird thing, I had added the range and it seemed to be enabled, but when I turned off the McAfee firewall I was able to connect, but when I turned it back on I wasn't. But once I added the individual addresses (the same way as I had specified the range) I was able to connect ok.

Again, dirty McAfee! At least adding them individually works. Bless your patience!