Windows Networking

Can windows computers be networked together or is it just one of those Internet myths?

I once tried to get my desktop and laptop to talk to each other. I spent hours googling, turning off fire walls, trying to follow threads on forums with conflicting advice, following steps on troubleshooting guides, using diagnostic utilities and trying to find out what the error and warning messages actually mean. All to no avail.

I even contacted Microsoft and was surprised to get a response.

In the end I bought a plug in memory stick to transfer files between my computers, they actually work.

I did eventually manage to get my laptop and desktop to talk to each other, I could even print from the laptop using the desktop's printer. But, somewhere along the line either I've inadvertently changed my network settings or installed something that did so now I'm back to square one. I'm not going through the trauma of trying to get the computers to talk to each other again.

By the way I have a FreeBSD server which I run under VMware on my desktop. I can actually log into that server from my laptop across the network but can I see my desktop Windows machine from my laptop? Well, not really. I can see the desktop in the 'Computers Near Me' window, sometimes. I used to be able to browse the desktop from the laptop by using the desktop's ip address. That doesn't work anymore.

So now I'm back to sneaker networking. That works.