[Puke]

carefull there narrew, while your suggestions are good, you might be causeing some problems for AT. Now i agree with you that most of the information is this thread is pretty missguided, based on incorrect assumptions, or just straight wrong. but I have to say you are taking the wrong track.

Changing to static addressing isnt going to do him any favors if he wants an easily managed network or has any adds/moves/changes later. right now, its a safe bet that his DSL device is providing DHCP. theres absolutely nothing wrong with that.

he has two windows machines. they each have their own netbios names. they will need to be in the same workgroup to be able to ping each other by netbios names, and will need to have their personal firewall software disabled.

first off, lets drop the idea that XP does not work on a network, or that you need any additional hardware. i dont know exactly what your setup looks like, but i can make some safe assumptions based on what you said:

you have two computers connected to SOMETHING. probably a hub thats built into some other device. Both computers can access the Internet, so we dont have to worry about modems or routers or any of that ****.

so we need to know how those computers are addressed. from a command prompt (start>run>cmd) you can type "ipconfig" to find out what you ip address is. each PC should have a unique address, which should be provided by your dsl modem / router / whatever. to verify those details, you can type "ipconfig /all" and verify who your DCHP server is. it should be the same for both machines. if there is none, then they already have static addresses. either way, we know your basic IP setup is right, because they can both browse the web. DONT **** WITH YOU IP SETUP IF ITS WORKING, YOU DONT KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT IT.

to test basic ip connectivity, which you should have, try pinging between the machines. "ping [ip address]" where [ip address] is the address of the target machine will do it. so if your two machines are addressed 192.168.1.10 and 192.168.1.11, and you are sitting at the .10 machine, you would type "ping 192.168.1.11" to ping the other one.

if this does not work (request times out, or destination unreachable) then you probably have a problem with personal firewall software installed on one or both machines. it is extremely unlikely that your dsl modem/router/whatever is preventing connections between ports on your internal lan. this is actually totally unheard of. not impossible, but its just too complicated of a feature to be included on most home neworking equipment. put it out of your mind.

so if the ping DOES go through then you probalby have a problem with netbios name resolution. try pinging by name instead of ip address. "ping bob" if bob is the name of your PC. if that doesnt work, double check your computer names. still not working? make sure both machines are in the same workgroup.

i'd be happy to help you troubleshoot it if you drop into #se4 before 5pm, or if you want to shoot me an email. but beware of most of the advice in this thread, its a bunch of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.