Gaming LAN Woes

[rmnoon]

My friends and I have had this recurring problem at our LAN parties. I'll run the network setup wizard in XP (each computer has it), give each system a unique name, install IPX, hub says everything is communicating, shared drives are accessible (for the most part) etc. When someone tries to host a game, however, the results are inconsistent. Sometimes two computers can only see a game when hosted on a third computer, but another computer can't recognize that one, its very inconsistent. Every computer has IPX and IP set to autodetect.

Today I had two computers set up, both could access shared drives. I installed IPX on both of them, and the IP addresses were set to autodetect. Same workgroup name, unique computer names...but each one couldn't recognize a game hosted by the other. We tried multiple games, same result.

The frustration factor is astounding, can someone enlighten me or point me somewhere that can?

I specialize in hardware, not networking

 

[defcom_1]

IPX? (I know what it is, i'm wondering why you're installing it )

You should only install TCP/IP (installed by default).

Run a (just one) DHCP server on the network somewhere, or manually give each machine a different ip address (example 192.168.0.1 subnet 255.255.255.0)
the next machine ip addy 192.168.0.2 etc. until 192.168.0.255 and keep all the subnet's the same 255.255.255.0 (or whatever you want as long as every computer is on the same subnet, 255.255.255.0 seems to be default)

That should be all you need.