I won’t have Internet temporarily, but I want to keep a Virtual LAN connection over my two computers. I have a USB-USB Bridge Cable by APC. I lost the installation disk, so I downloaded the software and installed it on both of my Windows XP Media Center 2005 computers. My eMachines computer worked fine with it, but my HP computer had problems. The software installed but it doesn’t show up. The Windows pinged three times of the same tone, instead of pinging twice with the first tone being lower than the next. Can you please tell me if I’m using the wrong software or if I need to update or download anything? I also have software called PCLinq2 which I can only used to file share but using it as a Virtual LAN would be nice.
From everything you’re saying it sounds like it is isolated to a problem with the USB port that you are using on the HP computer. Are you getting any kind of a “USB Device not Recognized” error? Are you sure that the USB port is working properly? Can you use another device successfully such as a mouse? If you are sure it is working, there are a few things you can do to try to get the computer to recognize the cable.
Windows XP will often not recognize a USB device that has been attached while the computer was in standby or hibernate mode. Have you tried to restart the computer and then plug the USB cable in?
Device Manager
You can try to get the cable recognized in Device Manager. Go to Start and then Run. In the box, type in: Devmgmt.msc and click OK. The Device Manager window will open. You should select your computer as the location for the scan. Find the Action menu and choose “Scan for hardware changes”. Close Device Manager and see if the USB cable is now recognized.
If not, you can try to disable power management in Device Manager. Get into Device Manager as you did above. Expand: Universal Serial Bus controllers. Right click a USB Root Hub then choose Properties. Click on the Power Management tab. Clear the check by “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power”. Click OK. You will have to repeat this for each USB hub that is listed. Now go to the Action tab and choose “Scan for hardware changes”.
PCLinq is also a good networking program. On the web, Prolific.com has the PCLinq drivers you need. I’m not sure about the three beeps on your HP, as three beeps usually indicates that there is something wrong with the RAM - you haven’t touched that have you? Not sure that the two issues are related.
If you aren’t successful in getting the USB cable to work, you can also investigate networking the computers using crossover cable on the network cards. I won’t go into how to do this here because it is a little long for this article, but if you need help with that, please let us know.
