Today our computer network stopped working.
I needed to access a file on our laptop from our Windows 98 machine. Nothing. Nada. The helpful message from Windows told me the nework was unavailable and I should contact my network administrator. Hello, that's me, and neither I nor me had any clue. Even more helpfully it told me to start the network troubleshooter, which then presented me with a totally blank screen. Apparently it had no more clue than me or I. For the record, Porter was equally stumped, though he manfully plowed through our home networking book for a while.Of course we tried the Universal Cure for Computer Problems: rebooting both machines, and even rebooting the router, although our connection to the Internet was still working fine. Ya never know with computer problems. But no dice.
Figuring the problem might have been caused by some Microsoft updates we had installed today (since everything had worked fine yesterday), I contemplated the other Computer Panacea: a System Restore. But it was dinner time, and then we watched Annie Hall, which movie left me just disoriented enough to be able to accept the absurd fact that when I returned to the computer the network was working cheerfully, just as if it had not stubbornly hidden itself all day. We had not done a System Restore (only contemplated it), we had not rebooted, we had done nothing but eat and watch a movie.
When the problem first became apparent, Porter asked me what I'd done to fix the problem last time it occurred. I was somewhat embarrassed to discovered that I had not made a note of the solution.
Now I know why.You don't have to feel too bad, because that is pretty much the official answer from Microsoft about Windows networking without a domain - it may or may not work, it wasn't really designed to do file sharing like that...
That is what they used to say in the days of Windows 95 and 98, so perhaps they would not say the same thing now, but since you are connecting to a 98 machine, I expect the answer hasn't changed. If you make the XP machine the master browser (which it should be - windows machines hold an election every 12 (I think) minutes about who the master should be) the network should be reasonably reliable.
When I have a mixed network containing 95 and 98 machines and I want to have the highest probability of windows file sharing working, I always make sure to boot an xp machine by itself first, and let it sit a while, and then boot other machines. It might be the case that a windows machine also forces an election when it boots up, so the timing of booting makes a difference.
And on a large campus of machine holding elections on every boot up, the network can get quite confused, which is where I got most of my windows networking knowledge. (The work I did in Hillsboro wasn't knowledge - it was just reboot any machine that didn't work, since that usually fixed it, but people still paid us to fix their networking problems...)
Win98? Well there's your problem.
Does Microsoft still provide updates for win98? I thought they stopped support for 98 a long time ago.
Sorry for the confusion. I discovered the problem from the 98 machine, but the main machine is XP and so is the other one, and the network wasn't showing up on them, either. Since we did several reboots, maybe it was the 12-minute thing that finally clicked during the movie.
