win98 on winXP network weirdness....driving me crazy!

Hey all,
I have a win98 laptop (named: dell) that I have hooked up to my tv right now. I have been using it to stream movies wirelessly from my other laptop that has winXP on it (named: asus). For some reason, the dell has decided it doesn't want to be able to browse the network anymore (the asus) and I can't even see the asus in dells network neighborhood. I also can't see the dell from the asus network neighborhood but if I type \\dell in the in the asus, I can get to all the shared folders on the dell. I tried doing the reverse by typing \\asus in the dell, but that didn't work. So something really fishy is going on and i cant figure out what it is. I would ideally like to be able to browse the asus from the dell to get my streaming movies working again. Oh BTW, I have another winXP laptop (named: toshiba) which can access the asus no problem and vice versa. Please help, this is driving me crazy!!
thanks,
Dan

 

I assume you have restarted the computers and have tried moving the dell to a different port on your router. Along with rebooting the router.

Can you ping dell from asus?
Can you ping asus from dell?

What does ipconfig /all from Dell give?
And what does ipconfig form asus give?

Please post results of these cmds from the Command Window.

 

They are actually both on wireless and I have tried rebooting everything but nothing happens.

From the asus, I can ping the dell but from the dell, I cannot ping the asus.

The ipconfig /all from both computers gives nothing out of the ordinary. Both have internal ip addresses, and both can access the internet......................And right as I am writing this reply I have noticed that the subnet masks are different. I switched them both to the same value of and they can both see each other now. I changed the asus to 255.0.0.0 (had to specify an internal ip address also) but kept the toshiba at 255.255.255.0. Now the asus can see the dell but can't reach the Toshiba. The asus can no longer access the internet either but the dell can still access the internet. Obviously this is a subnet mask problem but I am really unsure what this does anyways. Is there any reason why I should have the subnet mask be 255.255.255.0 or 255.0.0.0 ?

This is a slightly confusing situation here, I also can't figure out why it worked perfectly before.
thanks for the reply!

-Dan

edit: I changed the subnet mask on the dell to 255.255.255.0 and I can now stream movies from my asus! However, now the problem is that I don't have internet on the dell. Not the biggest deal since I just use it to stream from the other computers but is there a way to define the subnet and keep internet?

 

On the dell, does it it get the std Gateway and DNS pointing to the router? See if you can ping yahoo.com. If you can not you may have a DNS problem. Now see if you can ping 66.94.234.13. If not you have a gateway problem.

You computers should be on the same domain. The subnets should all be the same, 192.168.x.x, and a mask of 255.255.255.0, this will allow 256 ip's. Or the other private IP address.

If the Dell is not pulling DHCP from the routers, you can do a static IP, just assign the IP outside of the DHCP range. Now some wireless routers have the option to make the wireless and wired where they can not see each other. Normally this is on the wireless setup or advanced settings. If you are running firewall make sure you have a rule to allow your subnet. You may be forced to WEP on the Dell (Win98) some cards allow WPA (Prefered).

You may want to scan your PC for virus and other unwanted programs. Also make sure you have changed the def password on the routers. There were reports several months a go that hackers were hijacking routers, of users who did not change there def pw.