XP Home Network Upgrade...

  • Thread starter Thread starter jel183\(UK\)
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J

jel183\(UK\)

For some months now I have been experiencing various problems with my home
network:
4x XP (SP2) machines connected via a switch and using 1 of the PC's as a
host for the ADSL ICS.

Most of the problems seem to have been browser and firewall related. Having
read the posts here and followed what seemed to be the general advice I
finally decided to splash out on a wireless ADSL modem/router (with 4 LAN
ports). I wired three of my PC's to the router (the cat5 wiring was already
in place and I couldn't afford three wireless cards as well!) and connected
my laptop via a wireless PC Card.

The setup was quick and easy. The result has been outstanding. All
connections are rock solid, each PC always appears in the Neighbourhood
Places and has never (so far) dropped out, the broadband speeds seem faster.
I can now turn off/reboot what was the host PC without losing the
connection.

The purpose of this post is therefore to say to anyone experiencing browser
or connection issues - if you are not using a router - then get one and save
yourself a whole lot of grief... all I have to do now is save up for a
printer server !!

(I won't disclose the make and model of the router unless someone want's to
know because I don't want someone to spoil it by saying "I would't have got
one of those they are useless" or words to that effect!!)
 
jel183(UK) said:
The purpose of this post is therefore to say to anyone experiencing
browser or connection issues - if you are not using a router - then get
one and save yourself a whole lot of grief... all I have to do now is save
up for a printer server !!
Click to expand...

While all that is fair enough, it isn't hard to manually set up your own
network and get around the problems anyway. It only takes, if you decide to
manually assign IPs for example:

1) Assign each computer a name - needed.

2) Decide on a workgroup name (assuming XP home here) that is the same on
EVERY machine - needed.

3) Manually assign the unique IP number on each machine and set up the
gateway as the machine doing ICS - needed if manually assigning is wanted.

4) Manually fill in the IP numbers of the DNS servers on all machines - not
definitely NEEDED but certainly stops a lot of possible problems occurring.

5) ICS set up on machine that is going to do it if you are using ICS -
needed.

That's it. See, what you say about a router isn't necessarily the case. I
set up a NETGEAR 302G (I think that was the number) wi-fi ADSL modem/router
a few weeks back. It worked on Internet only intermittently and stuffed up
after each reboot. It was all auto assign at that stage. I got the shits
with it and told the modem to manually assign IPs to each machine as they
connected and then told each machine to use ONLY that IP number and the
minute I did, all went brilliantly.

The purpose of pointing all this out is that if you LEARN how to do it
manually even if you don't use it NOW, you can certainly save yourself some
grief in the future as you have an option to use in case auto doesn't work
for whatever reason.
 
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