Beginners Luck

Forgive me if this has been covered hundreds of times before. My beginner status means I do not really know what to look for in previous threads.
I have NTL Broadband into the house, a LINKSYS router, one wired connection to a desktop PC with XP Pro (this PC has the printer connected to it), one wireless connection to a desktop PC with XP Pro using a LINKSYS wiresless adapter and one laptop with XP Home with a wireless connection using a PCMCIA card.
All connections to internet work fine.
What I would like is to set this up as a home network so I can share files, printer etc.
Can anyone point me at a good resource (or help themselves) as to what I need to do.
Let me say now I have tried but to no avail - but then I don;t really know what I am doing.

You have a router and since the Internet is working I would guess that DHCP is enabled and IP addresses are being handed out automatically to the three computers. This means that all the IP settings should be correct.

Before you setup file/print sharing, check that all the computers can communicate between one another. Go to the first PC and click Start, Run and type cmd. In the Command Prompt type "ping xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" (without the quotes), replacing x with the IP address of the second computer. If you don't know this, go to the Control Panel, double click the network connection and select the Support tab. The IP address should be listed at the top.

Once you've typed the ping command hit Enter and check that you get a reply. Then repeat the process but trying to ping the third PC. Then, move onto the second and third PCs, pinging the other two computers from each.

Each time you do a ping, you should get 4 replies. If you don't get any replies, check that the computer you're trying to ping doesn't have any firewalls or anti-virus programs running which are blocking access to the computer.

Once you've done this and everything can ping, setting up file/print sharing should be pretty simple.

Thanks for the quick response.
I cannot see a "support" tab on the control panel network connections area. Am I missing something dead simple?
The IP address returned by your signature says both PC's have the same IP address. I guess that's the IP address to the outsdide world that the router is mimicking. Does each PC also have an internal network IP address?

Attached is a screenshot of what you're looking for.

If you don't see that, then click Start, Run and type cmd. In the Command Prompt type "ipconfig /all" (without the quotes). A lot of information will be displayed on the screen. One of the lines will tell you your IP address.



Yes, each computer has a unique internal IP address, and there's only the one external IP address for the whole network.