[Blood]

Hi

I am trying to help a friend with his home network. He recently purchased a Win7 Home Premium laptop and joined it to his home network which comprises a Netgear router, an XP Pro machine and a wireless printer. He has not been able to get the XP and W7 machines to talk to each other.

At present the Win7 laptop can browse the Internet, but cannot see the XP machine. The XP can't see the Win7 machine, nor can it browse the Internet.

I have tried the following:

Ensured that the same username/password combo is used to login on both machines.

All security software has been uninstalled.

Firewall service is stopped on the XP machine.

On the XP machine, 'Simple File sharing' (or whatever it is called), is disabled.

Both machines belong to the same ORCHARD workgroup.

The Win7 machine's network is set to Home.

The Win7 machine does not belong to a Homegroup.

I can ping by IP address but not by machine name from both computers.

Both machines use DHCP from the router.

IPConfig /all on both shows they have the correct IP addresses, and both are in the same subnet, both use the same DHCP server and DNS Server addresses.

When viewing the Network Map on the Win7 machine, the router and wireless printer are shown, but the XP machine is not.

We have tried using wired and wireless connections.

I edited the hosts file on both computers so that the IP address / hostname was present. This resulted in the XP being able to see the Win7 machine when \\IP address was used in My Computer (\\192.168.0.3), but \\hostname failed. The Win7 computer was still unable to see the XP machine.

Before I started my friend had reset the router, and had reset IP too in an attempt to get this working.

The only thing that is left on the XP machine is 'Twonky' Server which is a media server and which allows my friend's smartphone, TV, and computers to work together. Before the Win7 machine was joined and before the router was reset, all this worked fine.

He is going to give his ISP's tech support a call later today and see if they can help him troubleshoot it. Essentially, DNS resolution is not working internally, but I don't understand why the XP machine cannot access the Internet.

I don't have access to the machines at present, but if anyone has any ideas or suggestions we can try please post.

Hopefully, there is just something I have missed that will fix it.

Thanks!

[Blood]

Additional info: IP V6 is not enabled on either of the machines.

[Ossian]

Can you IPCONFIG/ALL on the XP and 7 machine?

[Blood]

Yes - they are both fine. The only difference is with each machine's DHCP sourced IP address.

[Ossian]

Would still be quite useful to see them...

Just a thought - is the router providing its own DNS (and forwarding queries to the ISP) or is router DHCP providing the ISP DNS servers direct to the clients

[Blood]

The router sets the DNS server via DHCP to its own 192.168.0.1 address.

I can't post ipconfig /all from each machine because I don't have access to them at present. I looked at them very carefully - they were on screen at the same time and I could not see anything wrong with them. I'll ask my friend if he can forward them to me.

Thanks

[Blood]

My friend has managed to restore full functionality. He said that resetting Winsock restored full connectivity.

I'll see him on Monday so will get the full gory details and pass them on.

Cheers!

[Blood]

Right - all he said was that he reset Winsock on the XP Pro machine. I know that he had tried this before but that it had not worked. When I was helping him last Saturday I setup a new workgroup etc, so perhaps something that was configured at that time allowed the reset to function properly.

Thanks again for the help, Ossian.