Banging head over seemingly simple internet sharing problem.

Alright went over to a friends house tonight because they asked me to setup their cable internet to be shared between the computers in the house. They have cable internet plugged into a 4 port en 104tp netgear ethernet hub. A desktop computer running xp home recognizes the internet and works perfectly (its connected to the hub) A second computer a lab top running xp pro is also directly connected to the hub (and appears to be sending and receiving from it) but will NOT connect to the internet. I changed every setting known to man on both computers with no luck. I ran the xp network setup a few times doing different settings choices, like this computer is connected to the internet and other computers are attached... And the one option under other which states exactly what we have two computers connected directly to the same internet (and it warns this isn't a good idea).

I have setup networks under 98, me, 2000pro just like this with no problems. is XP adding some sort of random security issue? (i played around with disabling the firewall, authentications, etc..)

Any one have any guesses or solutions or programs that just do this for me? I'm not an expert, but I setup internet sharing networks all the time and never had this problem. :?:

Please help! :?

The problem is using a hub. If you have all your computers plugged into a hub that is connected to your modem, only the first computer booted up will typically get internet access. You'll only get 1 valid IP address from the ISP (unless of course you pay for more.)

If the above setup is correct, you have two choices. 1) Replace the hub with a router. 2) get a second NIC for your main PC and plug that into the hub with other NIC going to modem. Plug other PCs in hub and setup ICS on main PC.

Thanks for your guys's responses. I knew that was the case (most likely) but they swore to me that it was setup like this before and worked fine a while ago and then just stopped working. My guess is somehow they got lucky sharing a dialup connection, but when they moved to cable that changed. (also probably when they got the hub) They made it sound like they had the hub before and I was like you were networking internet connected directly into a hub? (i was thinking is that even possible...)

I agree getting a router is the way to go and basic ones are cheap! using two nics and the hub would work fine, but no internet if the main computer is off, so that's probably not a solution.

Anyhow, thanks for confirming what I already though. I was losing alot of face with these folks i was trying to help.