New Dell Laptop can't connect to home network

[okayplayer]

Hi, sorry for posting this here, but I figure you guys would have similar experiences and are the best responders. I just got my new Inspiron 6000 and I live in a house with a Netgear wireless router which all the computers are connected to. I am able to connect to the internet, but not to my network (i.e., connect to the other computers). I ran the Network wizard and put in the "name" of our network, and still nothing. When I click View Work group computers, it is busy for ~30-40sec and then gives me an error message saying it could not connect to the network yada yada yada ... contact the administrator...

Could anyone help me on this?

[Chief911]

Are all the rest of the machines windows xp machines? Please give the OS of the other machines.

Nick

[okayplayer]

Yes, all are XP.

[Derek in NYC]

Call Dell.

[apd138]

You need to turn remote access on. right click on my computer and then go properties. go to remote tab. allow remote users to access the computer. also you need to make sure you have a password set, or windows security wont allow it.

[okayplayer]

[ QUOTE ]
Call Dell.

[/ QUOTE ]
I have spent the last 80min on the phone with them... getting no where, but talking to alot of Indians.

[PDX_David]

Check a couple of things:

Make sure they are all part of the same workgroup...

Right click my computer and select properties.
Go to the Computer name tab and verify that all the computers on your network are in the same workgroup. If not change and you may have to reboot.

The computers on your network need the same IP addresses except for the last 3 numbers i.e. 192.168.1.xxx The first 3 octets need to be the same the last need to be different. You can check this by clicking Start, then click Run, type in cmd, in the dos window type ipconfig /all
Verify on each pc that the IP addresses are similar. If you have a router then you most likely should be using dhcp.

You may also need to turn on file sharing here is a link to do that. File sharing link

[z80x86]

Don't joke around with [censored] like that as a joke, which I hope it was. You're just sticking it to someone who doesn't know what's wrong and had the balls to ask for help.