Although arguably Windows XP Home Edition is not appropriate for use in schools, it is often cheaper than Professional Edition and the administrator may not have a choice. My experience with a home network should also highlight problems a school network administrator is likely to encounter. Fortunately the Home Edition vs. Professional Edition that caused so much confusion with Windows XP networking receeded into the background with later versions of Windows.
In fact, later versions of Windows supposedly automatically correctly configure home networking without any issues. One should still check networking capabilities before making purchasing decisions, as what works well at home may nevertheless not be appropriate for use in schools.
What follows is an empirical description of what worked at home for me, not a theoretical description of why or how it worked. Some of the steps I took may be unneccessary or even downright wrong.
Even so, my general experience suggests any example of something that actually works may be useful to others. Once you get something working, you can take out components one at a time and see if it still works. A general rule of thumb for computer security is if it's not really necessary for what you do, turn it off. So besides the two computers I was looking at a small blue box and a small white box, both with lots of blinking lights.
What worked in my environment may or may not be applicable to slightly different environments. The "Simple Networking" provided by Windows XP Home Edition is not reasonable for use on the Internet without some sort of software or hardware firewall. Two things in particular really threw me. The other was that a common error message from Windows XP isn't very helpful. So lots of advice unfortunately doesn't state clearly which version it applies to, and the experience of typical techies at an office is mostly irrelevent to networking at home, but the advisers don't realize that.
Standard networking advice with Windows XP Professional Edition is to i disable the Guest account, ii disable "Simple Networking", iii make all the login accounts on the machines --including the passwords-- exactly the same, and iv manipulate the Local Group Policy Options, partly to minimize security risks. Login accounts and passwords are irrelevant since "Simple Networking" always uses the Guest account.
And there are no user accessible Local Group Policy Options; the folder where they are stored on Windows XP Professional Edition doesn't even exist, the icon in the Control Panel for manipulating them isn't there, the relevant snap-in for MMC cannot be enabled, and none of gupdate. You might not have permission to use this network resource.
Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions. The list of servers for this workgroup is not currently available. A myriad of different problems will result in this same error message, so don't try to attach any meaning to it. In particular don't conclude the problem really has something to do with permissions.
The first block of text is completely generic and appears after pretty much anything goes wrong. All you can really glean from it is "didn't work". The second block of the message may actually be somewhat more specific to the circumstance. But even so you'll probably always see the same words there, and they probably won't be very helpful toward solving your problem. Software Firewalls, whose job it is to keep your computer safe from the Internet, have default configurations that will almost certainly interfere with File and Printer Sharing.
Thanks for your feedback, it helps us improve the site. In reply to BarryCraggs's post on May 16, Just leave it blank. I would think that it is asking for a public domain or web site, like microsoft. You can have a private domain for your company server and network, for example, yourcompanyname.
If it's a private network you wouldn't usually give that out to just anyone, only the ones who work for you or the ones that you hire to work on your computers and network would need to know this, no one else needs to know your private network or workgroup name.
This site in other languages x. If the domain password policy causes the password to expire, then it is not possible to change the password from XP Home.
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