Connecting Work PC to home network

[arkleyjoe]

Hi,

I have a work laptop which is part of a domain. I would like to be able to share files and printers when connected to my home network.

How do I do this? Obviously the work PC needs to remain part of the domain.

ta

Joe

[Erik]

Use a flash drive or external hard drive. Most likely anything else has been disbaled, so this is easy and safe.

Another option is to manually map the drive on your home PC. You might need to do this by IP address. So go to My Computer, Tools, and choose Map Network Drive. There will be a place to enter the name using UNC. You can either do \\computer name or more likely \\IP address of PC.

I would just use a flash drive though. Quick, easy, cheap, and risk of messing up any settings on the work laptop.

[Variable]

Before the machine was joined to the domain it was part of a workgroup. If you right click My Computer and click on Computer Name you may see the workgroup named grayed out. If you change your home networks workgroup to this workgroup you will see your home network machines come up in My Network Places on the laptop. If you don't see it listed it is probably WORKGROUP. If you have XP Home/Pro machines on your home network they are probably MSHOME by default. After that it depends on your home network, if you use XP Pro your laptop will be able to see the XP Home machines but not the other way around. There is no easy fix for this unless your are a member of the administrators group on your laptop. In that case you would have to enable the guest account on your laptop. I would check with your Sys Admin. The other option is to enable the guest account when at home and disable it when you go to work. The guest account is a security hole. Since I assume you have tried to hook it into the home network and it doesn't work it is probably the guest account is disabled. Without knowing more about your home networks OS's it is hard to say more.