I have four computers networked at home in a wireless router. Three of them use Vista: Two x64 Ultimate and one x32 Home Premium. I recently downgraded back to XP SP3 from Vista Ulimate x64 SP1 because I can’t afford the RAM to put up with Vista’s retarded memory usage right now. So I reformatted and put XP on the desktop, set everything up. Everything worked fine. I copied my WoW directory from my laptop plugged directly into the router to the desktop (because its 100x faster), it worked then. I finished doing this and was STILL able to see my desktop. I unplugged the cable, I could still wirelessly access my desktop files from my laptop. There was literally one change between then and now. I turned off the desktop, and plugged in an additional SATA drive that has my music on it. Now I can’t see my XP desktop from my laptop but I can see and access my laptop from my XP desktop. All the network settings on both computers are the same, I turned off the firewalls, they are on the same workgroup, the network is set to private. I have absolutely no idea what more to do: I’ve repeatedly dismantled and reconfigured the entire network, to no avail. Someone, if you can, please tell me : What the fuck?
All four computers connect through a Wireless-N Belkin router. The gateway is set to the manufacturer default of 192.168.2.1. All four computers automatically retrieve an IP address. All four computers connect to the internet perfectly fine. Desktop A running Vista 32-bit SP1 sees and connects to the other three computers fine. Desktop B with Vista SP1 64 sees and connects fine to A C and D. Desktop C connects to dekstop A, B, and laptop D perfectly fine with no problems and can access and share files perfectly. Laptop D can only see A, B, and itself. This network has worked perfectly fine for years until about 1 AM this morning when I added an additional hard drive. I don’t understand what possible effect an extra hard drive could have on the network discovery ability of an entirely separate computer together. There’s no possible way it has anything to do with this extra SATA, according to the laws of reality as I understand them.
