My wife has finally returned from our UK adventure. She arrived back 2
weeks later than me since she was traveling with her girl friend on the
Queen Mary II rather than flying.
She had taken our Dell laptop computer with her. The laptop, along with
my Dell desktop, constitutes our household Win XP local network. I
replugged the laptop back into the same wired router connection it had
before it left, internet access came right back and I thought I was done.
Then she complained that she couldn't print something. Ah, how stupid
of me. While she was gone my ancient Brother laser printer had run out
of toner and I decided that the drum unit probably wasn't far behind.
Time for a new laser printer. I replaced the old Brother laser printer
with a newer model and all was well. But I had forgotten to uninstall
the old printer driver and install a new one on the laptop after she got
home. No problem. Install the new driver. No dice, no printing.
After some head scratching I finally realized that the real problem was
that the two computers were not communicating over the network at all.
I suppose there could yet be a problem with the printer installation but
I haven't gotten that far yet.
I reran the setting up of a local network on both machines and verified
that file and printer sharing were enabled and the firewall was set to
allow that. The end result was: The laptop can see that the desktop is
on the network as part of the workgroup but can't access it. However,
although the desktop knows the name of the workgroup it complains that
it can't access it at all. It doesn't even see that the laptop exists as
part of the workgroup let alone access it.
Running local network trouble shooting surprised me by asserting that it
thought the trouble might be a conflict of duplicate names. Well that
certainly wasn't true but I changed the computer's name just to force a
change. Still no help.
And now I'm stuck. I haven't a clue about how to proceed.
ps: A final data point. I had a related problem some time ago where
the laptop couldn't communicate with the desktop unless it logged on to
it with the desktop's password. That had something to do with having
not enabled a guest account which I had disabled thinking a guest
account without a password was dangerous. I'm still not sure about that
one. Supposedly something obscure about XP networking. But I'm not
even getting that far since I'm not being prompted for a password. Once
side can't access what it can see and the other side can't even see what
it needs to access. Ideas please!
Chuck Norcutt
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