Home network Sharing

K networking is by far my weakness so im here asking for a bit of help.

I have my router 3 computers and my cable modem (using Shaw extreme)

Cable Modem>Router (Linksus BEFSR41)> to the 3 comps.
my laptop and 2 desktops ( i run vista ult, they run XP pro).

Now the net works, they all are working fine but the network seems to be hating me.

All i want to do is share My doc's on the network for all the comps. so that we can access each others music and videos and stuff.



still learning how to use vista.. but i set up the network and turned off everything except network discovery and filesharing.

network name is Magnum and they all are in workgroup "WorkGroup" (cuz it seems i cant change the workgroup on my vista comp so i just changed the workgroup for the xp comps).

the other 2 comps are Many and Bob, i can see them on the network but i cant connect to them (i have already whent on the comps and set up the sharing on my doc's). bob for example doesnt have a password on his comp and on my comp i turned off password sharing in the network yet it still prompts me for a username and password....

and many it tells me acc failed contact the admin.

from you laptop can you access any of the other 2 machines? can you look into their shared folders?

So you want to share from the laptop?

Vista has several factors complicating sharing, such as firewall, network security settings, etc. It would be much easier (and safer if you decided to travel with the 'top) if you simply created a folder on one of the XP boxes, shared it, and used that as your community folder.

I have this as well, but I have a win2kAS dedicated fileserver. To go that route, I created one share on a data drive in the machine (not OS) and created folders for every computer on the network, plus some special folders such as backup for my website. From there I have a backup utility auto-backup to folders within the share folders, so if a drive dies in a computer i only lose settings and not actual data such as documents.

In the fileserver I have a secondary drive that receives a backup of the primary drive. That way one of those could die and I wouldn't lose data there either. All machines are on backup power supplies as well. It's not fool-proof, but it works well for my needs.

That's how I did it, but back to details. Make sure you have an account on all machines that match, both user and password. Makes things simple for sharing. Make your folder and right click, choose sharing and security, and choose share this folder on the network, then choose allow network users to change my files.

Now go to another computer on the network. Go to the run box and type in \\ip_address, where you have the actual IP for the shared machine. So let's say the IP of the share is 192.168.1.3, then you do \\192.168.1.3 and hit enter. You should see all shared folders on that computer now