Make a network = hard?

[VDPD2005]

Everytime I have had to make a network with the Network Setup Wizard it has never worked the first 20ish times. I just do the same thing over and over again until finally the shared folders shows up. Does anyone know why this is happening?

[alc6379]

Could you give us some of the specs of your system? Have you tried doing things manually?

Check out the help and support center from within Windows. There should be some good resources to show you how to configure network shares.

[VDPD2005]

sorry it took to so long for me to respond. Well, what do you mean by "doing things manually." The cables are connected and the router is plugged in. The wizard didn't help.

As for the specs of my system, what kind of specs would you like, I have the main parts listed.

Doing things manually means setting up one NIC as a manual IP address and the one hooked up to the modem set up as auto detect. Thats if you're networking without a router. If you have a router...the cable/dsl modem goes into the WAN port and then the other computers plug into the LAN side. You must login to your router using a web browser and use the address specified in your router manual...usually it is 192.168.0.1. After that, you can configure it up to your liking. Is this what you were asking about? You really did leave so much up in the air. If you were more specific we could be more specific in our answer.

[VDPD2005]

well i really dont know what im looking for. I'm just trying to make a network so that I can trade files, and do LAN games. I've done it before with the network wizard but this time it just wont do it. I tried typing in that address (192.168.0.1) and i got a login and password thing. Since its my network i thought that i could just hit OK and id get in but it says i need to put in a login and password. I do, by the way, have the broadband cable in the uplink, and the two computers in the LAN connectors. I'd really appreciate some help, thanks.

[Drew]

Make sure you dont have any firewalls on. If you try and network computers with any kind of firewall on forget about it, its not going to work.

A couple of weeks ago i spend 6 hours trying to network two computers together. I tried everything. I was about to give up when i realized that my virus program had a firewall in it. I turned it off and BAM, it worked!

So my suggestion is make sure you dont have any kind of firewall turned on. WinXP has one built into it, make sure that is off (if you have winxp), and make sure you dont have any other programs with a built in firewall (virus program, zonealarm, etc, etc).

[DMR]

I tried typing in that address (192.168.0.1) and i got a login and password thing. Since its my network i thought that i could just hit OK and id get in but it says i need to put in a login and password.

When you type in the router's address, you're accessing the router's internal Web-based setup program. The user/password dialog is a login message from the router itself; it is not a login prompt from your Windows network.

Different makes of routers have different default user/password combinations, which you will find in the router's manual. Linksys, for example, often uses a blank username and a default password of "admin".

Have you done any low-level troubleshooting on this? For example, after going through the network setup, have you verified that you can at least ping between machines using their IP address and hostname? Have you tried viewing and/or mounting network shares from the command line using the "net view" and "net use" commands?

DMR is right...for instance, my D-Link router uses the default login/passwd of admin/admin

I typed in http://192.168.0.1 in internet explorer...it popped up a login...I used my routers manual to tell me the info. Then, I changed the password immediately and configured my network using the manual (ok...so I didn't use the manual...but if it is your first time setting up a network you should :)) Let us know how it goes

[VDPD2005]

I did it!!! Thanks Drew, for some reason I overlooked the firewall. I have norton internet security 2004 and it had the firewall on with no trusted computers. I read an article in pc world where i found the command: (cmd /k ipconfig) it gave me the IP address of each computer. I typed IPs for the other computer in each computers "trusted zone." I then went to My Network Places and there were the shared folders from the other computer. Thanks guys wouldn't have been able to do it without u.

[Drew]

hehe, i guess im not the only one that forgot about turning off a firewall.

Glad you got it to work :)