>I'm trying to connect a laptop using a 10/100 3Com PCM/CIA card to a 10/100 3Com card in my desktop PC. I have two cards in the desktop - the first card is used to access an ADSL line and the second was supposed to give the laptop access to the desktop. I never been comfortable (nor successful) in trying to do anything related to network settings, configurations, protocals and all the other stuff that I desperately need right now. All three cards check out fine in the device manager and I've gotten both machines to at least show themselves (and appropriate shared drive) in the network neighborhood, but I just can't seem to get them to see each other. I even went out and purchased a developer's Windows 98 book and all it did was encourage me to pay to have this done. Can anyone give me a hand or some references that could help? I really didn't think this would be that difficult...
Welcome to my favorite toothache. I had to play with situations like this a dozen times in the last few years (since none of our customers are rich enough to have an NT server).
Check the Browse Master property: control panel/network/file and print sharing/properties. Set it to Enabled on one machine, and to Disabled on all the others. Don't leave it set to Automatic. Reboot'em all (it will demand it, anyway). Then, try to Find Computer - and gradually they'll show up. It takes them some time to poll each other, as you will notice if you rename one of machines: the old name may hang around for a while, sometimes days. You may try to pop into a DOS window and NET USE R: \\othermachine\c, sometimes it works before the machines see each other, or it bombs out with error 53 - if you get a 53, then you didn't do it (yet).
One thing works better than others: forget about NetBEUI and IPX/SPX and set it to TCP/IP only. Assign IP addresses to the machines (we usually go with 10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2 etc, with IP mask of 255.255.255.0) and use the machine with 10.0.0.1 as the gateway. No DSN, no gadgets, just the gateway. Worked in almost all of the cases where we had various network problems.
HTH, else shoot Bill, not me.
