Using desk top pc as hard drive for laptops

paulofessex

Hi, please bear with me, l'm pretty much a networking novice.

I'm hoping someone can direct me to a site/book that explains things in laymans terms.

Basically what l would like (if possible) is to make our desk top pc the main hard drive as it were for the 3 laptops in the house i.e. we can all save our files to that.

The desk top is XP as well as one laptop, the other 2 laptops being windows 7. Desktop is connected via the router, laptops all wifi connected. Printer is also wifi, unable to load printer software onto desk top due to printer spool issue (exhausted all avenues trying to sort that particualr issue)

Thanks in advance for any links etc

esuhl

Essentially, you just need to share some folders on your XP desktop so you can see them (in Windows Explorer) on the laptops. There's a quick guide to sharing files in XP here.

Hope this helps...

closed

and then find something to backup to.

buying a cheap nas device (a network enclosure for a hard disk) would be cheaper in terms of electricity.

googler

closed wrote: »

and then find something to backup to.

Exactly - if you throw all your eggs in one basket, dropping the basket can be a disaster.

If the desktop breaks or misbehaves, everybody is screwed. If your data is distributed over the machines you have, then if one stops, the others can carry on.