A laptop is now a part of the mix
While I was visiting Phil during my recent visit to Georgia for Father's Day, he graciously offered me his old Toshiba laptop that he was not using. Some time ago he had replaced it with a newer HP laptop and so the Toshiba had fallen into disuse. I was delighted with the acquisition. A laptop is something I've always wanted but could never bring myself to opt for when I was purchasing a new computer because one can get so much more in a desktop for the same money. Receiving one as a hand-me-down is the perfect way to acquire one it seems to me.

Once I got it home, I discovered that it had about 150 pictures that Phil had stored on it from his digital camera. Since the laptop doesn't have a CD burner on it, I needed to get those pictures from it to my desktop so I could burn them to CD for him, but of course, they were too large to export one at a time on a floppy disk over to the desktop. Even though that would have been possible, doing so would have taken far too much time and work.

Since I have a Linksys router, all I needed was a NIC (network interface card) to connect the laptop to the router and hence to the desktop. My friend, Josh, had one that he wasn't using, so he loaned it to me with the possibility of my purchasing it if he doesn't need it to access his new PDA that he is getting soon.

Immediately upon plugging the NIC into the laptop, the system recognized and configured it, and I had access to the Internet from the laptop because of it. However, I couldn't figure out how to get the two systems to see each other on the LAN. I ran the Network Setup Wizard on my XP system which went as expected and set up a network on that machine, but I still couldn't see the laptop. Last night, however, I finally resolved the confusion and got the two systems to see each other.

The crucial step I had missed, and the one that to me seems woefully obscure in the instructions that Microsoft provides, is that you must run the Netsetup.exe program on BOTH computers before they can talk to each other. Since that program doesn't exist on the Windows 98SE operating system on the laptop, I had to copy it from the XP system to floppy and take it over to the laptop and run it on that system. After I ran it and the system rebooted, the two systems communicated with each other as expected. It seems so obvious, as is always the case, now that it is resolved, but before that crucial discovery, I couldn't figure out why one machine couldn't see the other.

Now everything is working together, and I'm quite pleased to have figured out the mystery.
- posted by Perry @ 8:23 AM