Can't See Other PC on Home Network

[Peter A. Stavrakoglou]

I can't speak for "most MVPs," but speaking for myself, I don't agree with
you at all. Setting up a home or small office network under XP is very
easy, very fast to do, and works very well.

Ken , I agree that it is very easy to set up the network and get them
connected. However, sharing a USB drive amongst the network is flaky. I
set up tow systems at home last night. File sharing is enabled on all
(including my PC which was already set up). There are three USB external
drives attached to my system. On of the PCs I just set up can access, the
other can't with the message that it does not have permission to although it
really does.

Setting up the US Robotics router I bought and getting the other PCs in the
house to connect to the internet and share my printer is a piece of cake.
Getting all of the PCs to be able to access my USB external drive is not
exactly a piece of cake.

 

[Charlie Tame]

Ken , I agree that it is very easy to set up the network and get them
connected. However, sharing a USB drive amongst the network is flaky. I
set up tow systems at home last night. File sharing is enabled on all
(including my PC which was already set up). There are three USB external
drives attached to my system. On of the PCs I just set up can access, the
other can't with the message that it does not have permission to although
it really does.

Setting up the US Robotics router I bought and getting the other PCs in
the house to connect to the internet and share my printer is a piece of
cake. Getting all of the PCs to be able to access my USB external drive is
not exactly a piece of cake.

Can't speak from experience with USB devices as I rarely have used them but
one of the problems seems to be that there are two sets of permissions,
network access permissions and also NTFS permissions.

If you have set up the new PC with some "Standard" Admin ID and user ID(s)
as I generally do then the formatted USB devices may be seen, if the other
PCs were not set up that way it may be theoretically "Visible" via the
network but perhaps blocked by something else on the machine hosting the
USB. MS's idea of "Permissions" is not flawless IMHO or even logical
sometimes when they use "Enable This" to mean "Enable disabling this" and so
on.

I've certainly had occasions when hard drives swapped from machine to
machine exhibit so really strange "Permission" issues that require taking
ownership of files or folders I never set otherwise

Charlie

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Ken , I agree that it is very easy to set up the network and get them
connected. However, sharing a USB drive amongst the network is
flaky.

I can't comment on that, since I've never tried to share a USB drive. As a
matter of fact, it's unlikely that most people would even want to, since
it's so easy to simply move the drive to the other computer. I know that I
have no personal interest in doing this, since I use USB drives exclusively
for backup, and have them connected only while doing the backup.

 

[Peter A. Stavrakoglou]

I can't comment on that, since I've never tried to share a USB drive. As a
matter of fact, it's unlikely that most people would even want to, since
it's so easy to simply move the drive to the other computer. I know that I
have no personal interest in doing this, since I use USB drives
exclusively for backup, and have them connected only while doing the
backup.

I use the USB for backup of files from three other PCs in the house. Moving
the drive from PC to PC would work, but I'd rather not have my 16 year-old
mess with my system plus the fact that my wife's laptop is a 3 1/2 years
old and does not have USB 2, only USB 1 and the transfer rate is a bit slow.
Over the wireless network seems faster than connected to the laptop. It's
just easier in the end to have backups run and copy files over the network
to a USB drive. I'll get it working shortly on the one PC.