Question: Hi Garnet,
Had a question? Do you if it's possible to network Xp and Vista? My desk top is Xp and new laptop is Vista and everyone is having a hard time connecting, or whatever you call it, them. I thought you are great with computers and might have co-workers that migh know about a program. Thank you.
Answer: Thanks for writing... First, what kind of networking are you wanting to do? Play games? Share files? Share your printers? Is this in the office, or at home?
The first thing that must be done is the computer need to have connectivity.
The best way is probably wireless.... If you have a linksys wireless access point that connects you to the internet, you can connect both of those computers to the same access point. The access point will assign each of them a different ip address so that they can see the access point to get to the internet, and they can then see each other too. You need to know the computer names for each, but they should be accessible to each other.... They can also be connected with Ethernet cables to a switch or a hub. In that case someone may need to setup their internet addresses, or if the Ethernet cables somehow connect to a wireless access point (many do both wireless, and have a few wired ports too) then the access point can assign the address.
So all that establishes "connectivity" between the machines.
The other issue is security. By default, neither machine will be "sharing" any of its directories. Someone needs to tell each computer which folders, and devices (such as printers) that it is allowed to share with other computers. Part of the sharing involves setting up who the resource is shared with, whether it be everyone (not such a good idea on a laptop, or any machine at risk of unknown people connecting to it) or only certain user accounts, which must be setup with usernames and passwords.
Vista did try to make it more secure, but in reality it's probably just harder to do, but it still should be possible...
Another possibility: If you're wanting to do file sharing, a cheap way is to copy things onto a usb drive to move things between the machines. The other possibility is to get a "network attached storage" (NAS) device. I have three of these at my house, and they have gotten way cheaper than when I first bought mine. These have large hard drives and can be attached to your network, and they can let all your machines copy files to and from the NAS. The NAS has security, but it is usually easier to setup. So to move files from computer A to computer B, you first`move them from computer A onto the NAS drive, the computer B reads the files from the NAS. The NAS is nice because it gives you a place to create a backup of your files in case your computers break. Some NAS drives have two internal drives that are "mirrored" which means everything copied is put on both drives automatically, and the unit can continue to function with no loss of data if one of the drives inside of it dies. Budget about $500 for a large NAS drive with the mirroring capability.