Hi i hope someone can help me, I have a XP machine which connects to the internet and my girlfriend just brought a vista sony vaio if I link the two together then its all ok as I have done the re naming of computers and all that but if I try to go through the switch ( a netgear fs608v2) then we cant find each other again but i can still connect to the internet through this box.Again I hope someone can help me

Hi, Thank you for posting. I know that you connect the both computers to the Internet via a switch, however, the computers cannot find each other. Please let me know if it is this case, if I have misunderstand your concern, please feel free to let me know. At this time, please try the following to narrow down the issue: 1. Please ensure that both the computers are in the same workgroup and subnet. 2. Please check if the computers can ping each other by IP Address and computer name. You can also try to access the computers shares by the both the types as \\computer name and \\XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX. 3. Pleases check the firewall settings on both computers. 4. Please make sure that the Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) has been enabled on the Windows Vista computer and the Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) Responder has been installed on the Windows XP computers. Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) Responder (KB922120) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4F01A31D-EE46-481E-BA11-37F485FA34EA&displaylang=en Please also ensure that all the updates have been applied on both computers. 5. This issue can also be resulted by the factor that some third party security software or firewall blocked the access between the Windows XP and the Windows Vista computers. Please perform a Clean Boot to check the issue. How to troubleshoot a problem by performing a clean boot in Windows Vista http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135 How to perform advanced clean-boot troubleshooting in Windows XP http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316434 If the issue persists, please help gathering the following information for further research: 1. If you have another computer, please connect it to the network and check if it can see the other two computers. 2. Please also run ipconfig /all on both computers to export all the network settings and post the information to this thread. Hope this helps. Thanks. Nicholas Li - MSFT

Thankyou for your reply I have deduced that the box was broken and brought a router and it works but thankyou for your very helpful reply Matt