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Stephen LappinFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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Connect work laptop to wireless home network

I have a work laptop which is logged in to my user account on my work's domain.

I have a home WinXP PC on a wireless network. The Home PC is on a Windows Workgroup called HOME.

I can connect to the internet via the wireless network @ home. However, I cannot see my home PC, the shared printer on my home PC, or the HOME windows workgroup.

How can I see/connect to my HOME windows workgroup and the server/printer on it?
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camacho_marco

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I don't think a product like netswitcher is needed...I use my work laptop on my home network all the time...
Start with camacho_marco's guidance and post if you still have difficulty setting it up.
Okay, here are the basics for setting up P2P networking...  make sure that you are following this first...

1)  If you are running XP Pro, then turn off Simple File Sharing
2)  Setup all machines with IDENTICAL user credentials, including username AND passwords
3)  Make sure you have File and Printer Sharing enabled in the TCP Properties
4)  Share your folders and make sure you give appropriate SHARE permissions
5)  On the Security Tab (available when Simple File Sharing is off with XP Pro, or on an XP Home system accessed by the Admin Account in Safe Mode), give the appropriate NTFS permissions.
6)  Access the remote computer using the Run Line or a batch file:  Start > Run > \\computername (or IPAddress)\sharename
7)  Oh, and don't forget the Firewall!  Make exceptions, or turn it off!

Instead of running through a long cklist...  read my page on P2P troubleshooting, which will tell you where and how to look for such things as Netbios over TCP (NBT):

http://24.160.178.164/KipSolutions/P2PNetworks/TroubleshootingP2P.htm
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ASKER

I CAN ping my home PC from my office laptop (connected via home wireless lan).

However, I cannot view my PC in explorer, or enter \\computername as a url. I was hoping that I would be able to do this, and then be promted to supply a username password.

Neither can I view/connect to shared printer hanging off home PC.

I have set up a shared printer and shared folders on my home PC, so I expected to at least see them in explorer. I do not want to have to install other software in order to achieve this, if it can be helped.

Any ideas why explorer on my laptop cannot see home PC/shares, but I can ping it?
What is the exact error message that you get when you try to connect?  Have you tried using the IPAddress instead of the Computername?

BTW, if you cannot make a connection, you will not be able to reach the shared printer...  and you don't need 3rd party software...  I never recommend it..  :)
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FriarTuk

you need to make sure that your work laptop is getting a local connection to your router.  compare the results of start - run - ipconfig /all on both the laptop & home pc.  plus they must be on the same workgroup (your work laptop might be set to a domain netwk config - hence netswitcher is a good idea to use), and they must have netbios enabled over tcp/ip on the wins tab (local area conn prop's - tcp/ips prop's - advanced utton).

I think you have a DNS problem. try and use this on the explorer bar \\(computer ip address)

Cheers
None of the suggestions worked (I was not willing to install 3rd party s/w to do this).
BUT, my PC died and I had to rebuild. When I set up network sharing with the WinXP network sharing wizard, my work laptop could see and access my home PC. There was no need to setup identical credentials on both machines, or have them both registered on the same domain/workgroup.

I'll give camacho_macro the points.