Pat said:
bb:? Yeah, I did turn off the firewalls sort of late in the process.? I find the Win firewall disconnects me all the time.? Have to leave it off a lot.? However, when I tried to install Zonealarm on my XP Media Center PC, it crashed.? The PC did.?
I'm just doing something wrong or clicking on the wrong items or not deselecting something.? Eventually I'll get it right, and it'll be a known task.? I hope.?
--pat
Wow - that's a lot of problems with firewalls that I haven't seen or experienced before.
I'd recommend going back through process from ground zero. With any Internet connection disabled -Turn off both computers - turn one and disable the firewall - then the next.? Next, each PC?s Ethernet adaptor needs to be configured with a static IP address and a common Subnet mask. As was mentioned before assign the first PC an IP address of 192.168.0.1 and the second PC an address of 192.168.0.2. Both machines should use the Subnet 255.255.255.0.
Also, as mentioned before you?ll want to make sure that both machines have been configured as members of the same workgroup. Any name will work for the workgroup name. All that?s left to do now is reboot the system. Upon reboot, go to Command Prompt (Start-ALL Programs-Accessories-Command Prompt) and try to Ping the other PC. To do this, just type PING and the IP address of the system you?re trying to reach (eg? C:\>PING 192.168.0.2). You should get 5 replies.
If for some reason your Ping returns a timeout message, you might have another problem. The most common issue has to do with Windows XP and the Internet Connection Firewall (ICF). The Windows XP Network Setup Wizard will sometimes enable ICF on your Ethernet adapter. ICF is designed to protect you from threats outside of your network by blocking unauthorized traffic from reaching your PC.
ICF is supposed to be used only on the interface that directly connects to your Internet connection; however, if ICF is being used on an interface that is being used to connect to another PC, it will block all the transmissions being sent to it. It will not even respond to pings. As a result, ICF must be disabled in order for this to work.
To disable ICF, simply right-click on ?My Network Places? and select Properties. Right-click on your LAN connection and then select Properties again. Go to the Advanced tab and uncheck the box that reads ?Protect my computer and network by limiting or preventing access to this computer from the Internet.? Click OK. Now try to ping the other PC again. Hopefully it'll work.