Thinking about upgrading to 7 but don't have enough to afford a copy for every computer in the house. If I were to upgrade some of the pcs to 7 would they still be able to network with the XP pcs or will they throw a tizzy at being on the same wires as an xp system

Works fine.

My netbook is on XP, and my stationary is on 7. I share my DVD drives and harddrives with my netbook without any trouble

BUT.

You need to log in with a user. And the user MUST have a password. Either create an account for other PC's to log in to, or put a password on your own. This also lets you manage user rights etc., if you want to hide something or whatever. It was the same deal on Vista btw. (If you make virtual drives, which I recommend for ease of use, you can write what account name and password should be used, so you don't have to login every time you connect from a XP computer)

You can bypass the password access thingy in the "advanced share options"


tab of the network - and folder access center (I hope this is right).

That would be very useful if we understood german.

In English

Didn't know about that by the way. In Vista it seemed I couldn't make it work without passwords. But I'll keep them on. If someone was to gain access to my wireless (albeit encrypted) I wouldn't want them entering my computer.

Maybe it only seemed, you could gain access by enabling guest account.

To actually enter someones wirless he has to do a lot of work to actually gain any access on it. I would recommend turning off password sharing and instead turn on the mac adress filter in your wireless settings.

Ah I didn't try that actually

Yeah, just open the command window (start ->run(perform/execute->type in cmd) and then ipconfig /all to show your mac adress.

(for the ones who dont know)

mac address can be easily changed