Here's my problem. I have a small home network with 3 pc's. A desktop with XP pro, a Media Center PC with XP MCE 2005, and notebook with Vista Home Premium. My problem is, I'd like to be able to sync my laptop with the XP desktop on a regular basis, because the nightly backups are done on that pc, and we'd just like to have them synced. Currently we're running DHCP, as we have been for years. And it hasn't really been a problem, until recently for some reason, the desktop PC switched IP addresses. So all my mapped drives on the laptop went screwy, and the syncing app wasn't working. So I had to remap the drives and reconfigure my syncing software. So I was thinking I should switch to static IP's. However, I don't want to have troubles when we take our laptop remotely to another network. I'd still just like to be able to hop onto a wifi network without having to do anything funky. So what would be my best bet here? My router does not have the ability to reserve IP addresses while on DHCP. Thanks.

what do you mean the ip went screwy? didn't it just get a different dhcp address from your scope? That would only mess up mappings/sync software if you were using ip addresses to do your mapping. Use host name and you won't have that issue.