Turn off any firewalls for debugging. If the firewall is the problem, you'll have to configure it to allow access to "trusted zone" addresses. Note that some firewalls must be completely uninstalled to stop them from affecting your networking.
Hold the
Windows key and press
R, then type
CMD to open a command prompt.
In the command prompt window that opens, type type the following commands:
PING each remote computer by IP address, and if successful, PING by name. Open a command prompt as described above and type.
PING <ip address>
or
PING <computer name>
Where:
<ip address> - is the x.x.x.x IP address
<computer name> - is the computer name
A failure to PING is almost always a firewall configuration issue. Any failure to PING needs to be corrected before you go any farther.
Note: You can obtain the IP address and computer name of a computer by opening a command prompt (DOS window) and typing IPCONFIG /ALL. This should work for any Windows version. The IPCONFIG /ALL display will provide a wealth of useful information for debugging your network connection.
Check your Services are Started on all PCs:
- Computer Browser
- DHCP Client
- DNS Client
- Network Connections
- Network Location Awareness
- Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
- Server
- TCP/IP Netbios helper
- Workstation
Note: You can check the services in Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Services.
All of these services should be started, and their startup type should be automatic.
On each computer, please do this.
Hold the
Windows key and press
R, then type
CMD to open a command prompt:
In the command prompt window that opens, type type the following commands, one at a time, followed by the
Enter key:
NBTSTAT -n
IPCONFIG /ALL
Right click in the command window and choose
Select All, then hit
Enter.
Paste the results in a message here.
If you are on a machine with no network connection, use a floppy, USB disk, or a CD-RW disk to transfer a text file with the information to allow pasting it here.