A friend has two wireless laptops (one a Dell, the other and Acer, both running Vista Home Premium), working thru a Netgear router (sorry, I don't know the model, but he said it was a $30 unit). Each laptop can access the Internet, but they cannot see each other. Over the phone, I walked him thru checking the IPs: one has 192.168.1.2, the other has 192.168.1.4; subnet, GW, and DNS are the same on both. Had him try to ping one laptop from the other, but only got "request timed out." Had him go into his router's setup to check some things, including the wireless encryption setting, but that appeared to be OK. Told him to try turning off the firewall on each laptop (I thought he said that at least one of them may be running Norton, which could also be a factor). I'm not that familiar with Vista yet, so I'm not sure if this is a network hardware driver issue, or what. Any suggestions as to what might be the problem? Anything else we should check?

1 Corinthians 15:3-4

The reason why they cannot see each other is because file & printer sharing has not been enabled. Click on the link below for a walkthrough.

http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Wi...

i_Xp/VistaUser

Thanks, XpUser, I thought he may have already enabled File & Print Sharing, but I'll have him double-check that. However, would that prevent one laptop from even being able to ping the other?

1 Corinthians 15:3-4

I guess it does. I don't have file & printer sharing enabled on this network. I get request timed out messages when I try to ping another PC by its IP address.

i_Xp/VistaUser

go onto the router and wireless settings there will be a setting called Wireless Isolation. this stops the wireless devices from talking to each other or to other wired devices.what it means is they can use the internet but not connect to any other computer. its designed so if some one finds a hotspot the network is safe.

file and printer sharing wont affect pings as its on the wrong part of the osi stack. layer 7 as aposed to pings that work on layer 1>3.
what might also be part of the ping issue is you can tell computers not to respond to pings under connection properties.

all text needs typos. There there for the reader to find,to distract them from the total lack of content.
google it! wasnt the answer to the question i asked so dont be dense and give me that repl

Thanks for your input, lordmanhamer. I'm not sure if his Netgear router has them, but
I'll have my friend check these settings.

1 Corinthians 15:3-4

Check both computers and router again to see any firewall (router firewall, Windows firewall, antivirus firewall) enabled that causes this ping and file sharing issue. I strongly suspect there is firewall enabled somewhere.

As for file sharing, check this simple file sharing in Vista and password protected file sharing in Vista to see any misconfiguration.