I've got a new client that is utilizing a workgroup of two computers, one with windows xp home, and on with xp pro. They've not had any networking issues (ie: they can share files), they're utilizing a very basic router and hub. They can share folders on the xp pro box and on the home box with no trouble.
Recently, they just added a third computer, with xp home in their warehouse.
While each xp home box can see the pro box, they will not see each other.
I gave each box it's own IP address and after a reboot was able to get the two xp home boxes to talk to each other by using the path of it's ip address and then the shared folder. For whatever reason they still don't see each other if you look at "computers in my workgroup" - in fact no cpus will show.
Now the whole purpose of adding this third machine in the warehouse was so that they could fulfill POs that were generated in Quickbooks 2004 from the main admin office with Quickbooks in multi-user mode.
The main problem is that while all network operations are slow, but functioning, (in reality the whole network setup needs a full overhaul), there is a drop in the network connectivity, which causes Quickbooks (which is using this shared file) to ABORT with an error (Error 64). They lose all their work if they haven't saved recently.
Not having any experience with XP Home in a network environment:
(1) Is this a bad practice? Should I have them all on PRO to see if that resolves these errors?
(2) I'm beginning to think it's a hardware issue...One thing I DIDN'T try yesterday was to reset the router. do you think that might solve any issues?
(3) QB support (and other help files, etc) point to it being a HW issue. I'm quite reluctant to start pullilng out network cards and the like.
In the end their network is quite a bit of a mess, and I'm trying to resolve this without having to restart everything from scratch.
Thanks!
jeff
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