Thursday, May 06, 2010

Networking Windows 7 with XP - setting the workgroup name

Here's a tip. Having just updated to Windows 7 I couldn't find where to set my workgroup name (which is the name you set for all computers on your network). Well it's not under Networks in control panel (which is where you might think it should be) but under System instead.

From the Start menu select Control Panel, System; then to the right of "Computer name, domain, and workgroup settings" click Change Settings. You can change your Computer Name here as well, BTW. Click Change settings and the workgroup option (which was greyed out) becomes editable in a dialog box. Set it to whatever workgroup name you use for all your machines (in XP the default was MSHome, I think... in Win7 it's just Workgroup. So it's not going to work out of the box, it just needs some help.)

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