Wireless Networking Help

[jzm7jmr]

Hi
I have a HP pavillion laptop p4 3GHz with windows xp which has a built in 802.11g broadcom wireless adapter i have upgraded with SP2 recently. i have bought a belkin 802.11g pci adapter to fit in my desktop which is a emachines p4 2.4GHz running xp with SP2. i checked before i bought it that the pci was okay its 2.2 (the minimum was 2.1 for the belkin card). anyway i installed as per the instructions installing the software firat then the hardware and it all seemed to go ahead fine, no problems but when i try to get the 2 talking to each other they dont seem to recognise that they are there. i put them next to each other and nothing. they did both separaetly find a 3Com network which was very faint i assume someone up the street has one but i cant get them to interact, can anyone help, i would be most grateful
Thanks

I contacted belkin and they gave me some advice and i was able to get the two connected over a peer to peer network but i still cant browse the files on each of the computers when u look in my network places on each one, it only shows up the computer u are no, not the other one to. i followed all there instructions, turning off the windows firewall, sharing etc and still cant get them to see each other. they suggested pinging the computer from the command prompt which i have done but it always says time out 4 packets lost, which i told them about they suggested it was a xp problem and directed me to a link on microsoft website about networkingbut as far as i can see i have done all they require and still cant get them to work. can someone please help

 

[athlon64fx]

allrighty!

go to my computer right click, properties, computer name, click change, and pick teh workgroup option, make the workgroup name the same on both pcs. also make sure that the IPs are setup right.

go to "network connections"
go to the connection
make sure that it has gotten the right IPs if it is setup as defualt for DHCP
if not you may have to statically assign an IP
do this by right clicking on that connection and going to properties,
now go to TCP/IP protocol
then click properties.
now go to the address section and enter the values that you need.
(for help on this go to the router setup on linksys network everywhere routers or linksys in genreal go to the IP confi address and then look at the settings there and the IP range)
then you'll enter these addresses in there:
for example if my router had the IP of:
112.110.1.1
your IP address Id select would be: 112.110.100.1
the subnet mask is inputted for you:
the defualt gateway is your router's IP. which in this case would be 112.110.1.1
and then look for the DNS servers on your routers setup....
To get online with Internet explorer you'd go to your internet explorer properties and go to connections, then lan settings,
there you'd check the "automatic settings" checkbox and click ok.
then click ok to close the rest.
to share files all you would need to do is to right click on "my computer" and go to computer name and choose a workgroup name for your home network shoose soemthing creative and easy to remember keep it short.
then do the same on teh other computers!
next after work group configuration right click on teh folder(s) you wish to share and go to the properties page and go to teh sharing tab and click "I want to share this folder..." and then click ok.

 

[jzm7jmr]

im going nuts!

thanks for your reply but i still cant get it to work. i do not have a router, i was just trying to connect the two computers together on an ad hoc basis but it seems to be failing miserably.
i have tried running the home network wizard which ran fine on both computers but they still cant se each other and i can share files across the two of them. i went and bought a flash disk so ic ould run the wireless network wizard to set them up on each computer but this didnt work either. they automatically connect to each other and they say they have an exellant signal strength but i cant access the computers. one thing i have noticed is that each one seems to be sending packets out but they say they have received zero back. and trying to ping them from the command prompt using the ip addresses they give each other never works either. does this mean that they are not actually properly connected??
i dont know what to do, and now if the wireless network is connected if i go on aol it seems to lose the connection after about 5 minutes and i have to restart it. its fine if i disable the wireless connection i dont understand why
can somebody please help before i throw the laptop out the window!

 

[athlon64fx]

be sure that you have the workgroup settungs correct.

if correct should be an option in your wireless setup to have them run in ad-hoc mode. make sure all IP settings are correct

 

[jzm7jmr]

both the workgroups name are exactly the same on both computers
the ip address is 169.254.241.97 on the desktop and 169.254.241.161 on the laptop. the computer has asssigned these automatically, i wouldnt know what to change them to or if they were wrong
the belkin network i set up was an ad hoc network

the other weird thing is that when i took my laptop over to a friends house, i switched it on and it found someone who had an unsecured network connection to the web which i was able to use to surf the web with but i cant get my two computers to communicate
any more suggestions

 

[jzm7jmr]

it works

after phoning belkin they told me to download the new driver from their website which i did and installed and this seemed to make it worse, the computers wouldnt connect at all so i took the card out uninstalled the drivers and then put it back in. i tried to let windows find some default ones but it didnt so i used the ones that came with it on the disc. i have no managed to get the two computers connected and able to share files over the network but i have only managed to do this by havingan unsecure network. i wasnt able to get it to work with wep, i tried but it asked me for a wep key even though they did it automatically and i didnt know how to find out what the key was. anyway it work, thank god

the reason i wanted the network is i have a nebulla digital tv card on the desktop which you can stream across a network to other computers so they can watch tv without having hardware physically attached. however, for some reason i cant get that to work at the minute, i dont know whether u know anything about that

thanks anyway for all your help, if you have any sugeestions they would be appreciated

Jon