Can't See PC on Home Network

[mrlynn]

I can usually manage to finagle PC network settings and sharing to I can see one on a network from my Mac, but not this time.

My son and his wife have a TiBook running OS 10.4.11 and an HP laptop running XP Home, respectively. They are linked via either Ethernet or wireless (I tried both) to a Verizon DSL modem/router.

They were both using DHCP; I tried switching to static IPs, but that didn't help. I didn't see any firewall problems. But son wants to back up wife's HD using the Mac and his FW drive, and he can't see the PC. After about two hours of fiddling, including creating a Workgroup on the PC and sharing its C drive, I gave up.

Any suggestions? I didn't have DNS numbers for the static IPs, so could that have been the problem? And anyway, shouldn't the two DHCP units see each other?

/Mr Lynn

[Seacrest]

mrlynn wrote: Any suggestions? I didn't have DNS numbers for the static IPs

/Mr Lynn

What do you mean by this?

Have you tried cmd+K, then 'smb://192.168.1.xxx' from the Mac?

[clay]

do both computers have the same workgroup name? also, make sure to power off and on your router

[DRR]

Depending on the way the network is set up, they will not necessarily see each other automatically.

You should either have the Windows PC's IP address (if you do, try Seacrest's suggestion) or a discovery protocol installed on the Windows PC.

http://support.apple.com/downloads/Bonjour_for_Windows

To find ip address on the windows machine you can either double click the wireless icon in the system tray, or StartMenu/Run/"cmd"/"ipconfig". It will most likely be in the format, 192.168.xx.xxx

[mrlynn]

Seacrest wrote:
[quote=mrlynn]Any suggestions? I didn't have DNS numbers for the static IPs

/Mr Lynn

What do you mean by this?
In Windows TCP/IP Properties, when you switch from DHCP ( "Obtain an IP address automatically" ) to a fixed address, you also are switched to "Use the following DNS server addresses" (a Preferred and an Alternate). My vague recollection is that these are obtained from the router, but I'm not sure.

/Mr Lynn

[mrlynn]

Thanks for the suggestions!

Son and his wife are out of town till later next week, when I'll try to get over there and see if they help.

Will report back.

/Mr Lynn