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hello all. I have a quandary and figured this would be the place to start looking for answers. Thank you for all of your excellent reviews and information.

My problem is this. I am trying to set up a home network between my new athlon desktop running windows 98 SE (my preferred OS)and my latop running ME. I am having difficulty establishing a home network connection from the desktop. My laptop is registered as "laptop" on the entire network, under the group entitled "workgroup" All its network settings are on default, same as with the desktop. I have a working ethernet connection for both computers, and a working Netgear EN 104 4 port hub. Yet for some reason, my desktop can not connect to the entire network. Can someone please walk me through the process or point me in the direction of a tutorial? The Windows Help file is as usual, of no help whatsoever.

Just to get this straight you have two computers one with 98SE and ME? Are you using the same workgroup name on both? What protocols are you using and have you tried sharing a drive?

yes, that is exactly the case. I am using a TCP/IP protocol, and I have the same workgroup name for both ("workgroup") No, I have not tried sharing a drive, because my desktop (running 98 SE) will not let me view the entire network and so I cannot even get to that point. The laptop will let me view the entire network, but the only computer listed is itself.

Thanks for the help

if you've got TCP/IP going, try the following:
on each machine, ping the local loopback address (127.0.0.1)
on each machine, ping the local assigned address (whatever you assigned to it)
from each machine, ping the OTHER machine's assigned address

let us know how that goes

I've encountered a similar issue with networking ME and 98 together before where one machine would stop seeing the other machine. I'm embarrassed to say that I fixed it by running the networking wizard.

TCP/IP networking on small networks between 9x machines can range from mildly annoying to migrane inducing. Save yourself the headache and load NetBEUI, the rest should fall in place.

Actually there is a simple solution for this. Anybody else remember about the HOSTS file in Windows. Search for it and there are instructions for specifying names for each box. That's the way I got IP to work on a small network before I got a router and just started using DHCP. Much easier

-Howard

If you are still stuck (and you want to persevere with TCP/IP), post the IP settings for both PC's so we can have a look and make a comment.

Bruce