Home Network?

I was just given an early xmas gift of a new laptop  (horray!).  I was after something very lightweight, so I went for one without a CD/DVD drive with the plan of buying an external one for the few times that I needed to install something from a disk or burn something to a CD.   Whilst talking to my dad last night, he informed me that I shouldnt need one as I should be able to network my laptop to our desktop and use it's drive, but when he tried to talk me through it, (by going to the desktop, right-clicking on the CD drive and clicking share) it wouldnt let me share the drive... The new laptop is running Windows 7 and our desktop runs Windows Vista.  Is this possible?  What might be the problem?  Maybe the destop's firewall?

Dunno if this will help

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/guides-how-tos/1008-how-share-root-drive-under-vista.html

Hi Mirrajay,
You're dad is correct in so much that you can share a drive on a Desktop PC over your home network and on other PC's Laptop that are connected to the same home network.

I haven't had a look at the link posted by tremula, however, at this stage there are a number of possible areas which are causing it to fail. Desktop Firewall, Laptop firewall and security settings. Also, you need to setup both machines to be on the same home network name - else they wont 'see' each other. Windows 7 does have some new functionality which makes sharing easier, however that also requires the other machine to have Windows7 as well. You'll need to do a little digging around to find information in order to make this work - it's one of those things which is fairly straightforward to setup when you're at the machines, but hard to type out in a message forum like this! You may also need to take a look at your router settings as well, just to add another area for you to look into!

Good luck!

Cheers, DtM! West London & Slough UK!

Mirra - I do this now with my desktop to my laptop but to share my itunes folder from my desktop to my laptop oh and to share one printer.

You do set up a home network - it walks you thru it on XP not to sure about vista or windows 7.  Name it the same, give it a password and allow access from the firewall and you should be good to go.

Try this page http://www.brighthub.com/computing/hardware/articles/26291.aspx

Thank you everyone.  I will give it another go when I get home!