Windows XP Hacks

Install NetBEUI for Better Peer-to-Peer Networking

If you run into problems when networking PCs with different versions of Windows, the NetBEUI protocol should solve your problems. But beware: don’t use the XP-specific version. Instead, follow this hack.

The Holy Grail of Windows peer-to-peer networking is the absolute reliability of network connections between computers. When you open My Network Places and try to access the shared resources of any other computer on your network, you shouldn’t have to wait a long time or be faced with mysterious error messages.

Unfortunately, Windows XP is surprisingly prone to these sorts of peer network problems in mixed-Windows-version networks, especially when you network NT/2000/XP with 9x/Me computers. Most experienced Windows network administrators believe you get the best network browsing reliability by using Microsoft’s NetBEUI network transport protocol and TCP/IP. But there’s a problem. With the release of Windows XP, Microsoft officially stopped supporting NetBEUI. The network protocol is included in a legacy folder on the Windows XP CD. But the XP version of NetBEUI is considered to be inferior to the Windows 2000 version, and Microsoft has even admitted that possibility.

The solution is fairly simple, then. Install the Windows 2000 version of NetBEUI on your XP PCs instead of using the XP version. Caveats? Yes, two. Some people have problems with NetBEUI in wireless networking environments (my belief is that this is a broadband-router-specific ...