[moonknight]

Ok, my goal is to access my dell tower from my laptop, both run XP so i was wondering what i would need and just the genral theory of how to do it. or a place to learn. Just for those curious why, i am making more room on my desk for my mom to work and weboth have laptops but don't want to clutter our laptops up with like music/photos and stuff like that.

wouldn't all i need is a double usb plugin?
or a double thing for the monitor? (sorry im not good with names of stuff)

[KYA]

What exactly do you want to do?

[moonknight]

Well i want to be acble to access it like my laptop is the monitor kind of. So like i can use it to get all the files for like my ipod and my photos but without copping to my computer. kinda like a portable hard drive i guess

[stayscrisp]

You can use a crossover ethernet cable to connect the 2 computers and then "set up a small home or office connection" with file sharing.

[moonknight]

what? so jsut use an ethernet cable?? plug them in straight away or go threw my router?

[Gorian]

well, preferably a router, especially if you are thinking longer term, as generally you will only have one ethernet port unless you manually add another. To find the ip of your desktop, goto start and type cmd and at the command prompt type ipconfig /all this should tell you what your IP and MAC Address. Then, from the laptop, you can access the files on you desktop my typing \\192.168.1.20\C$ where 192.168.1.20 is the IP of your desktop, and C is whatever drive you wanna access, generally C: unless you have more than one. You will be prompted for the user name and password of the computer you are trying to access. Enter it and you will have access to all the files on that computer. Another thing you might find useful is Remote Desktop, which comes with XP and Vista. Just run it, type in the IP, and the user name and password, and you are running the computer from your laptop.

[moonknight]

Umm, I am having trouble with the reomote desktop, completly is there an online "tutorial" on how to set it up? im at microsofts and it is really difficult to do i followed it but it keeps saying it is wrong an giving me like eggor messages saying it can't connect.

Does the host computer have to off or does it have to be logged off? cause im rite now logged on to it

it says (the error thing)
"the client could not connect to the remote computer"

"remote connections might not be enabled or the computer might be too busy to accept new connections. It is also possible that the netorck probelems are preventing your connection"

"please try connecting again later. If the problem continues, contact your 'admin'"

This post has been edited by moonknight: 29 November 2009 - 06:04 PM

[no2pencil]

You will need to have a "professional" version of Windows to perform Remote Desktop. This would be for example "XP Professional" "Vista Professional" "Windows 7 Professional", if you have a "Home" version, then you'll need another piece of software to work as the server. I would suggest PC Anywhere.

[stayscrisp]

Gorian, on 29 Nov, 2009 - 03:48 PM, said:

well, preferably a router, especially if you are thinking longer term, as generally you will only have one ethernet port unless you manually add another.

Well he will have one on the desktop and one on the laptop, that is all that is needed. You are right though, a router would be a lot better. With a router you will need to use a straight through cable not a crossover.

[Gorian]

Well, what I am thinking is that if he has a router, he probably has internet through it. If he goes through the router, both computers will have internet, and it is easy to add more computer to the network if need be. Otherwise, one computer will have to connect wirelessly and he will have form a network bridge.

@Moonnight, you will also need to make sure that both computers allow Remote Desktop access, probably found in your security option.

[stayscrisp]

You could also try a network drive, this will be a drive that sits on your network and can be accessed from any computer over the network. I don't know how expensive they are but an office I work at have one and it is very convenient, just fill it with anything you dont want on your own hard drive

[moonknight]

that sounds good and actually just about what i want so thanks. ill check newegg.com