OK, I"m going to put this here since you guys dragged me through the whole mess of getting XP and W7 talking.......
I only have a little hair left, and what little I've got is in serious danger of being yanked out!
BTW: I finally realized the thing about using a directory for sharing versus a partition... The directory is a lot easier if you have the same account on both machines... SO, for the partition I was sharing I put a directory at the top, stuck all the other directories inside that one, and now I just share the top level directory..... Perty easy..........
BUT, and I don't even know if this has ANYTHING to do with Windows 7, but here goes:
Main machine is hard-wired into DSL modem, running Windows 7, and works perfectly.
Machine2 is a laptop running XP, wireless to the modem, ALSO works perfectly.
Machine3 is a desktop running XP, also WIRELESS to the modem, ALSO works perfectly.
The world is a happy place......... ISP comes along and says "hey, upgrade to the 7Mbps modem", so I do.......
And the new modem supports WPA and WPA-2 security (which tells you how old the old one was)......
Drop it in place, fire it up, set the WPA security and everything is fine.......
Main machine is happy since it's on a wire.
Machine2 (laptop) is happy since it supports WPA security. It's 4 feet from the modem.
Machine3, (ALSO about 4 feet from the modem) after several hours of fruitlessly trying to get it to hook up, DOES NOT support WPA - set the modem to WEP and everything was fine, set to WPA and no connection. Went out on internet and found the site that says Belkin f5d6001 DOES NOT support WPA.......
OK, off I go to pick up a new PCI wireless card for machine3. Found an inexpensive TrendNet card that supports WPA and put it in..... Says it's connecting to the modem fine, SAYS it's mapping the network drives from Machine1, but it's SLOW........ SLOW, SLOW.... Insists it transmitting and receiving at 54MBps, but opening a mapped directory, if it opens at all, takes 10's of seconds..... LONG TIME... Go back to WEP, still slow. Works fine going out to the Internet through the modem, but talking to Machine1 is SLOW.......
Dragged machine4 into the mix...... This machine is a dual core, 4GB machine, quite fast, running Vista. Stuck the card in.... And got the dreaded, but apparently widely occurring, "can only get local connection" problem... spent HOURS chasing solutions on the net, none of which worked. Except by dumb luck for a short period I actually had a connection, but it went away at the next reboot..... SO, I dumped Vista and put XP on Machine4... got everything going and the connection is SLOW...... As slow as before.......
SO, I took the Trendnet card out, and put back the old Belkin card, set the modem down to WEP, and things worked fine again. I keep all the kits on machine1, and the directories where they are is mapped to the other machines so I can install software from 1 location...... Installed software, ran Quicken using the data files from machine1, etc...... Things work fine.
Put Trendnet card back in machine4, leave it on WEP, and it seems to connect OK, sees machine1, but we're back to SLOW...... And WPA appears to be even SLOWER.........
As near as I can tell, I'm not recording any errors in the event logs on Machine1 OR Machine4 about the network or data transfer or anything, but I can say that not only is this slow, it loses the connection periodically......
I'm not going to say it's IMPOSSIBLE, but I'm having a hard time believing a basic network card could have a major problem like this, so I'm asking if there's anything between Windows 7 and XP that'd be involved in this performance issue? I'm presuming it HAS to be the card, but...
Ideas?