Developer Forum

Hi, I have 2 desktops and one laptop connected to a linksys router for
dsl internet connection and it works great. Can i use it to network
the computers (for printer/file sharing?) I look in network
neighborhood and I dont see the other computers, and this doesnt seem
to be covered in the maual. thanks

All 3 computers should be able to see each other. You can test this
by 'pinging' one computer from the other. What OS do you have running
on them? Note that once you turn on a computer, it may take 15-20 minutes for
that computer to appear in the network neighborhood of the other computers.

Sujit D'Mello

If you're using anything like Windows 95, 98 or ME, then viewing each
other is a very hit or miss thing. This behaviour of Windows was
improved immensely once Windows 2000 and XP came out. Even if you have
2000 or XP, but the other boxes are one of 9x/ME clan, you're gonna have
trouble with them too.

Yousuf Khan

Untrue. Any PC running any flavor of XP, W2K, or W9x can be made to
network with and share files with any other such PC; nothing hit or miss
about it. In fact, even a PC with W3.11 should be able to join the fun.
And, PCs running NT can also join if using NT v4.0 or later; probably
some earlier versions of NT as well (3.51 seemed OK).

But, not all printers can be so universally shared: some printer vendors
do not support sharing cross-platform (e.g., XP-W9x). Also, some NICs
were sold before their design was completed, so some standard features
just won't work -- IIRC, auto-negotiation failures used to be common.
--
Cheers, Bob

Thanks for the theory. Now in practical terms, only Win2K and WinXP are
anywhere near reliable in sharing resources over the network.

Yousuf Khan

Maybe your experience is different from mine; maybe not. From my
experience, the networking and sharing pieces are at least as reliable
as the underlying OS. But, no question that W3x is less reliable than
W9x and that W9x is less reliable than any of the NT-based OSs
starting with NTv3.5 or so.

That does not mean that NT/W2K/XP score particularly well in terms of
reliability, only that the NT/W2K/XP OS family is better than any of
its predecessors.
--
Cheers, Bob

I'm sure I'm not the only one that's had to reboot a computer several times
just to get a couple of them to detect each other in the Windows 9X days.

I think in those days TCP/IP was a new concept to Windows machines (though
it's been around for decades on Unix machines). Often you couldn't get file
sharing working with only TCP/IP loaded, you often needed to enable NetBEUI
or Novel IPX.

Yousuf Khan