i am using one winxp computer in my network.that computer does nt show all the other computer in the network ,but when i find the computers it is searching and showing the computers.why it is happening like that how can i see all my computers in the network with out fail?? any one please help me

Here's how to identify and overcome the most common of those networking woes. FILE AND PRINTER SHARING FOR MICROSOFT NETWORKS NOT PRESENT IN WINDOWS 98 Windows 98's network stack ‑ the collection of device drivers that control Windows 98's networking ‑includes a component known as File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks. When present, this component allows Windows 98 to share out files and printers, and to see other machines doing the same across the network. There are a couple of things to remember about File and Printer Sharing in Windows 98. It's not installed by default. If you install Windows 98 on a machine that has no networking capabilities or dialup only, File and Printer sharing is not enabled; it has to be turned on manually. To do this, go to the Network icon in the Control Panel and click on the File and Printer Sharing button in the Configuration tab. Check off "... access to my files" at the very least. (Note that you cannot actually give anyone access to files or folders unless you explicitly share them out.) Also, there must be a “network component” labelled File and printer sharing for Microsoft Networks present in the list of network protocols above the File and Printer Sharing button. If it isn't there, click Add, select Clients, and File and Printer Sharing. You might need to provide the Windows 98 CD‑ROM for this step. Something needs to be shared for your machine to be visible on the network. If you're not sharing anything, you have no reason to be visible. You can still browse other people's computers (provided they're sharing something!), but you won't be visible on the network as having a share. The obvious way to solve this problem: share something ut on the target computer and it should show up! (There may be a slight delay from the time you start sharing to the ime when the machine appears in other people's Network Neighborhoods – in Win98). THE WRONG WORKGROUP NAME Most of the networks where XP machines and Windows 98/Me machines talk to each other is a workgroup environment, or a peer‑to‑peer setup. Every machine acts as both a client and server, depending on what they are doing at any given moment. Microsoft's mechanism for grouping machines hat may be sharing the same LAN is the workgroup, a way of signifying which machines are peered to which. In Windows 98, the workgroup setting is under the Network Icon in the Control Panel. Click on the Identification tab and you']] see entries for Computer Name, Workgroup and Computer Description. Computer Name and Description can be almost anything you want, but the Name must be unique to that machine. The Workgroup has to be exactly the same for all machines on the network that need to see each other. By default, Windows 98 sets up a workgroup named WORKGROUP (all workgroup names are upper case). It's a good idea to change this from the default to be certain you've inspected every machine's network settings ‑just make sure the workgroup name is precisely the name for each machine you want visible to each other. Workgroup names should be letters only – no numbers or punctuations. LOGIN CREDENTIALS Windows 98 and XP deal with users in fundamentally different ways. When Windows 95 first came out, there was generally only one user for a given copy of Windows ‑ a holdover from the old Windows 3.x days where there was no user/login system. When you install Windows 98, you're asked to create some kind of user login information when you set up local networking. But not everyone does this and the network login can be bypassed by simply pressing the Esc key. Because of this, most Windows 98 machines don't have any kind of network credentials they can pass on to other systems. User credentials are used for verifying if a given user should be granted or denied access to a shared component ‑ a file, a folder, a printer for instance. If there is no user information sent, then the request is automatically denied. Worse, if the username on both machines is the same but the password information is different, the login will still be denied. The only way to get around this is to ensure that every machine that is either accessing or being accessed has the same username and password on it for each user. Go to the User Accounts and Password icon in the Control Panel and add the proper username and password information. Do this for each machine, client and server. After this log off and log back on again on the machine you're using to access the network with this new username and password. You don't have to be logged in this way at the machine you're trying to access; you just need to have the right user credentials registered in it. But you do need to be logged in as that user on the machine you're accessing from. If you're trying to access shared items on a Windows XP machine, adding new users in XP is simple: Control Panel, User Accounts, Create a new account. The new account should be a "Limited" account, not an "Administrator" account, unless you want to grant that user Administrator level network access to your XP computer. BROWSE MASTER PROBLEMS One other lesser‑known problems, especially in a heterogenous network, is the Browse Master issue. To understand this you must be clear on how Microsoft Networking works. In order to see the contents of the local network, one of the Microsoft Networking machines on the network maintains what's called the browse list. This is a list of which machines are currently attached to the local network and providing what shared resources. When you start up your computer, the machine will scan the network to look for a master browser ‑ a machine that maintains a copy of this list. If it doesn't find anything, then it conducts an "election" to select a new master browser. The type of machine selected for the master browser is, in descending order of preference: Windows XP Professional Windows XP Home Windows 2000 Server Windows 2000 Professional Windows NT 4.0 Server Enterprise Edition Windows NT 4.0 Server Windows NT 4.0 Workstation Windows 98/SE/Me Windows 95 Windows for Workgroups 3.11 If you had two Windows 98 machines on a network and one Windows 2000 machine, the Windows 2000 machine would be elected to become the master browser. An election also takes place if the master browser goes offline, is shut down or otherwise unable to continue maintaining the list. This system doesn't work all that well, and whenever different kinds of Windows machines appear on the same network the elections often misfire and produce confusion. One way to get around this is to simply force all the machines that you know are never going to need to be a master browser and to never allow themselves to be set up as master browsers. This way, the machines that should assume this role (such as the Windows XP machine that you have running all the time) always will. To stop a given machine from being a master browser, click on the File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks service in the network stack and click Properties. In the Advanced tab that comes up there will be a selection for Browse Master. Set it to Disabled, click OK, and close everything. Reboot to make the changes take effect. This isn't a perfect solution either. If your XP machine goes down, none of the other machines can be a master browser and the local network will appear to be empty. But if you know that one machine is almost always going to be up and deserves to be the master browser for the network, this is one way of avoiding this problem. NETWORK PROTOCOL CONFLICTS Protocols are the underlying language of the network, the standards upon which all machine‑to‑machine communications rest. Most of us are familiar with TCP/IP, the protocol used by the Internet and by almost all LANs as well. TCP/IP is the one network protocol that is installed in just about every Windows machine by default. In the early Windows 95 days, TCP/IP wasn't always the protocol of choice. NetBEUI was also used as the main Windows local network protocol. NetBEUI is a non‑routable protocol, used specifically for local networks instead of wide‑area networks like the Internet. Many people have a NetBEUI driver installed on their Windows 9x systems, especially if they've had the system for a while. The problem with having both NetBEUI and TCP/IP in the same system, especially a Windows 9x system, is that the two can interfere with each other. Most of the reasons for keeping NetBEUI have now passed into history: it was claimed that NetBEUI was faster than TCP/IP for routing local network segments, but the difference in speed between the two at this point is not worth the hassle. If you have NetBEUI installed, remove it and stick with TCP/IP for both local and wide‑area networks. OTHER UNDERLYING NETWORK PROBLEMS Sometimes the reason the two machines cannot see each other is simply because the network is fundamentally misconfigured. This stage of troubleshooting should be done before anything else to make sure all the basics are covered: Do all of the machines in question have an IP address? If your machines are linked together in a LAN and use ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) to get to the Internet, they should all have an IP address. You can check this by typing WINIPCFG in Windows 9x/Me: or IPCONFIG from a CMD [DOS] prompt in Windows XP/2000. If there is no IP address (0.0.0.0) or if the IP address is autoconfigured and there is no gateway address, then your machine is not properly connected to the network (Check that the cable didn’t fall out of its socket!). Also check to make sure the network hardware itself is not malfunctioning ‑ sometimes an accidental tug on a network cable can pull a card clean out of its socket. Can you ping the target machine? If both machines have an IP address, try ‘pinging’ the machine in question. Ping sends a test signal to a given machine or IP address and then listens for an answer. Simply type PING at the command prompt ‑ for instance, to ping a machine at 192.168.0.2 you'd type in PING 192.168.0.2. If you get "Connection timed out" or some other error, then the two machines aren't talking to each other at all, and there is some fundamental low‑level network problem that needs to be resolved first. Can both machines ping themselves? This is a good way to determine if there is some low‑level problem with the network stack in either of the machines in question. Use the command PING 127.0.0.1 or PING localhost to make the machine ping itself. If there's no answer, then something is very wrong with the computer's network stack, and it may need to be removed and reinstalled.