Windoze gurus - advice please?
 

Guys

My 8-yr old son is putting pressure on me to set up Need for Speed Porsche (old game, yes I know) so we can race each other on the home network. His machine runs XP Pro, mine runs W2k. I cannot get the two machines to connect while in the game (you have to feed the slave IP address to the host machine). So I started pinging the machines using cmd, with timeout result from both ends. I have tried every possible setting with Windows firewall, but no luck so far.

I am running Trend Micro on all 4 machines on the network. The pc's obviously "see" each other, as network printing works fine. Yet something prevents pinging the ip's, which in turn is the reason why I cannot get the machines to connect in the game (I think). Do I have to mess around with Trend Micro's settings?

Any suggestions?

TIA

I'm not familiar with Trend Micro, but it sounds like you will need to open up the ports for ICMP (to ping) and whatever TCP/UDP ports the game uses, which should be in the dox for the game.

Yep, usually it's a port thing. Find out what port# is attached to the IP address and open that up... Or turn off firewall temporarily while you play.

As stated above, ping uses the ICMP protocol. Its being blocked somewhere in either Trend Micro, or in the windows firewall.

If you have private addresses (192.168.x.x), I would assume you can safely disable the firewalls temporarily to troubleshoot the problem. So do just that. Disable Trend Micro and the windows firewall, and see if you can connect. If the answer is yes, enable them individually to isolate which on is the source of the problem.

Software "firewalls", antivirus and anti-spyware programs can cause problems with these peer-to-peer games...