Topic: Networking Vista Laptop with Windows 2000 Desktop

[mattmiller]

Anybody had the need to do this and had success?

My wife's parents have an old desktop with Windows 2000 that I built for them with spare parts that were being thrown out at my office.  800 or 900 MHz Duron CPU with 256 MB of RAM.  It works fine for them for the few pieces of software they use and to access the Internet.    For Christmas, we bought them a webcam to use with that Skype service to video conference with their other daughter, who just had a baby, and lives 1200 miles away.  Unfortunately, the webcam does not work with Win2000, and the specs recommend at least a 1 GHz CPU anyway.  I failed to check into that before ordering it.  Simply upgrading to WinXP likely wouldn't work, assuming the CPU spec requirements are accurate.  So I started pondering the best (i.e., cheapest) way to give them the ability to use the webcam, but then found out that they had pondered the idea of getting a laptop anyway.  So, sick of thinking about it anymore, I took the easy way out and ordered them a laptop with a built-in webcam on Christmas day, since I felt bad about getting them all excited opening up their webcam only to break the news to them 30 minutes later that I couldn't get it to work with their computer.  A $500 lesson on top of the $50 webcam that now resides in my collection of spare parts.

So now I have the laptop, which has Vista only because I discovered Windows 7 doesn't support their officejet all-in-one printer (for once, I had the foresight to look into something before ordering).  I've got the laptop working great in my home on my XP-based network.  But I'm having trouble finding any information on how to successfully get it to network with their Win2000 system, which I'm sure they're going to want to do.  At a minimum, they'll want to be able to print to their OfficeJet, but ideally share files as well.  As a backup, I just ordered a print server (another $70) that I can use to network their printer in the event that I can't get the Vista laptop to communicate with the Win2000 desktop over their wireless.  This is the better way to network the printer anyway, since sharing the printer from the desktop would require them to have the desktop on anytime they wanted to print from the laptop.  But, if at all possible, I'd like them to have the ability to share files between the two systems.  The Win2000 is formatted NTFS.  I've found a few other people trying to do this, but seemingly none of the recommendations have worked for them, and the threads seem to have died with no resolution.  But I also can't find any statement declaring that it, fundamentally, isn't possible for some reason.

I'd like to avoid dropping another $100 on an XP license, if at all possible.  At this point, I could have bought them round-trip tickets to see the baby in person, which is kind of a depressing thought.