I don't know much about XP ME, but for XP Pro machines to do file sharing, file sharing must be enabled. I assume that both systems can access the Internet through your router. If not, then something more fundamental is wrong with your network.
. make sure that each XP box can see one another. This can be done by using 'ping' at the command prompt. From XP-1 do "ping XP-2" and from XP-2, do a "ping XP-1 (substitute XP-1 and XP-2 with your machine names)". If they can't 'ping by_name', then at the CMD prompt, do 'ipconfig /all'. This shows a bunch of information one being the IP address. Do this on both systems and repeat the 'ping' test but with the IP address instead of the system names. If that doesn't work, then you must have fundamental networking issues.
. Make sure that the systems belong to the same Windows Workgroup. This may not matter, but I set mine all the same anyway. Any arbitrary name can be used. Goto Control Panel > System and select the Computer Name tab and press the Change button. There, the name of the computer and the Workgroup name can be set.
. If the systems use DHCP, which they probably do, then NETBIOS will resolve machine names to network addresses. On my home network, I don't use DHCP and each system has a fixed network address. I also disable NETBIOS because native TCP file sharing is faster. If your PCs don't use DHCP, then the fix is beyond the scope of what I can tell you in this reply. It has to do with assigning IP address and editing the 'hosts' file.
. Go to Control Panel > Windows Firewall, and make sure that "File and Printer Sharing" is checked.
Then after that, file sharing should work. Just be sure to set up a share folder on your systems. In the Windows Explorer, create of mark a folder as 'shared' and see if you can actually share that folder from the other system.
Again, I don't know much about XP-ME or even XP-Home, just XP-Pro. I hope this helps you.
I feel as though I should have been able to accomplish this fairly easily but I'm having issues.
I have a desktop PC running XP ME that controls my Netgear wireless router. I've had the network up and running for over a year now with no file sharing enabled.
I recently bought a laptop running Windows 7 and want to be able to access the files on my desktop. I have file sharing enabled on both computers but neither computer can see the other. I've also hardwired the laptop to the router to see if that would make a difference but no luck.
Thanks for your help!

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