Hey all, Okay, so currently at home, I have a desktop running Windows 2000. The home computer has broadband internet connected to a wireless router. I also have a laptop with Win XP Pro, that I use at work and connects to my network there. When I come home, I can easily connect to the wireless network and surf the internet from anywhere in the house. Great. Now, what I would like to do is buy an external networked harddrive to back up both the contents of my desktop and my laptop. Something like a Maxtor 200GB external. To do that I think I need to set up a home network between my desktop and my laptop. However, my laptop connects to my network at the office too, and when I tried to configure it to connect to a home network, I ended up locking myself out of the laptop (kept showing me the login screen but my password wouldn't work). I had to take it to a system admin at work to get back on. Is there someway to set the laptop to connect to both networks, depending on whether I am at home or work? And if I can't, is there someway to still be able to use the external hard drive? Share printers off the desktop? Any of that? Help would be appreciated! Thanks!

You could try a second Hardware Profile configured for your home network. Ask your IT people at work to help you set this up.

A hardware profile concerns what devices are started up and have little to nothing to do with domain or workgroup access. The only way a hardware profile would help is if you had two nics on your laptop. One would be enabled for work with domain binding and the other for home with workgroup binding. of course the other one not in use is disable in the hw profile. My experience says you can NOT do both with the same nic. Mike there is a product called Netswitcher which addresses this issue of home/work logon and its fairly cheap [$20?] I doubt you have the finances or desire for a NAS [network attached storage] which is basically a drive [storage] attached to the network. What is referred to as an external drive, like you mention, is one that is attached to your home pc via USB usually. Once installed you share it and this provides the storage media to your local pc as well as your networked laptop. Lots of basic networking how tos. Check out those in the left column here.