File Sharing Between Win98SE and WinXP?

June 19, 2005 2:03 PM

Help with file sharing between Win98 and WinXP?

I've recently joined the 21st Century by buying a new laptop (with WinXP) to replace my 6+ year old desktop machine (with Windows 98SE.) I was able to get my D-Link router to serve the Internet to both my old machine (to which the router is directly connected) and the new laptop (via a wireless network.)

But I can't figure out how to make the new laptop access the old desktop's files via this network. (I want to do this as I think it's probably the easiest way to copy many GB of MP3's as well as a few GB of data files, e-mail archives, etc.)

I'm pretty sure I've got the (basic anyhow) networking options set-up properly with the same workgroup name and different computer names for each. But no matter what I try, I can't get the two computers to find each other.

Any ideas on next steps or things that may be causing the problem? (One idea someone suggested is that I may have spyware on my old machine that would block this kind of file sharing - is that possible?)

I've also tried plugging a new external HD directly into the desktop machine but it wouldn't recognize that HD either. Again, any idea why? (Could my old machine be USB 1.0 while the new external one be 2.0?)

I'm not much of a computer guru so any help would be very greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance...

posted by Jaybo to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Try this
posted by SpecialK at 2:07 PM on June 19, 2005

You might have to manually load the drivers for your USB drive onto the 98SE system. 98SE was the first OS with USB support and hence the plug-and-play is a bit spotty to put it mildly ;-)
posted by Ferrari328 at 3:42 PM on June 19, 2005

Have you made the drives on Win98 shareable?

Right click on the drive in Explorer, go to Properties, and look for the "Sharing" tab...set up the options there and then it should be viewable from the network via the XP machine.
posted by First Post at 8:02 PM on June 19, 2005

I'm pretty sure I've got the (basic anyhow) networking options set-up properly with the same workgroup name and different computer names for each. But no matter what I try, I can't get the two computers to find each other.

When I first set up my xp/98 network, all the network settings in my xp machine were disabled. The network wizard would run, and no errors were indicated, but I wouldn't be able to access files between machines. (It was kind of a cat-and-mouse game; sometimes the directories were visible, sometimes not, but the files were never accessible). I went into the Windows settings under Program Access & Defaults (or whatever it's called) and found that the network-related windows features were not selected. Once I clicked the boxes and rebooted, my network worked fine. I tripped over this by chance; I never saw any help files directing me to this and there were no xp error messages that popped up when I tried to set up my network alerting me that the network settings were not properly configured.
posted by Doohickie at 7:46 AM on June 20, 2005