Off Topic - trying to map network drive with wireless router

[Blade]

Hi,

This is a little off topic but I know there are some smart people here that might have come in contact with this.

I just bought a laptop which came with a internal wireless card. I have a LinkSys wireless router and I have a linksys 16 port hub. I have my main HS PC which is hard wired to the router using CAT5 connected into the hub. I can connect to the wireless router with the laptop with no problems and surf the internet. This works fine.

The problem I am having is that I tried to map a network drive on the laptop to a shared directory on my HS desktop PC and it will not map it. It causes the laptop to hang and then I must reboot. I am running Windows XP Pro on both the desktop and the laptop. I have setup 128 bit SSID on the router and like I said the laptop gets a connection right away with no problems, except that I cannot map a network drive from my other PC. It looks like it is going to map it (brings up a new window and everything, but then it just hangs). I did have it map the network drive correctly once, but it took 3-5 minutes to map it. I must be doing something wrong.

Has anyone had trouble with mapping network drives using a wireless router?

[billc]

Blade
Are all of your computers running the same encription? Most of the vendors have WEP64 available and some support WEP128 as well. 40-bit WEP and 64-bit WEP are two different names used interchangeably for the same encryption method. Since no official standardization has been assigned for the terms, wireless vendors will use either term. Try turining off the encription and then goto my network and expand it in Explorer by clicking on the + sign.
If you can see the comuter and drive on the network this way you should be able to map the drive I am running 2 XP Pro, 1 XP Home and 1 98 with no problems. Once you establish the connection to the drive than try the encription. It makes no difference if they are NTFS or FAT32 as I am running both but you need to set the permission on the drive, and it is best not to share the root directory. Pick a directory folder and set the properties to share with the level you want read only or more.
This heeds to be set before you map the drive.

BillC

[tel0p]

WEP should have nothing to do with sharing/mapping between XP boxen, its on a different network layer alltogether.

1) Make sure both computers share the same 'WORKGROUP' name.

2) Make sure 'Simple file sharing' is turned off. [ from Explorer: Tools > Folder Options > View tab -> Advanced, uncheck last box)

3) Try using the exact same username and password pair on the laptop as you do on the hardwired box.

4)If you can, set the hardwired computer to use a 'static' IP address (ie, 192.168.X.Y)

5) Since you're behind a gateway/router, you should be safe turning off ICF (the XP firewall).. do this, and use your Linksys admin page (, Advanced, Forwarding) to manage your incoming ports if needed in the future.

Good luck, hopefully one of these will solve your issue......