One of my friends asked me to help install movie players in his computer so he can watch movies. The computer is his company’s, and some limitation is imposed. The most annoying one is that the property of local network connection is disabled! I never thought this is possible under windows XP. Anyway, as I need to copy some files over, so I have to setup the connection between my laptop and his. The workaround is to set my IP address to something in the same C sub net as his computer, such as 169.254.220.235.

The next issue is I can not browse his file shares. When I access \\169.254.220.234 (his laptop’s IP), I get "can not access error". After turn off his windows firewall, I can connect now, but it keeps asking a username/password to login. However, the username he normally uses can not login. I am forced to create a new one in his computer and login with it.

Now, finally, the two computers are connected. Next is to install some codecs, real player and upgrade his media player. All went well.

After that, I tested some avi files to see whether they can be played, but no success: real player/media player just crashes, and in fact, even exploeror will crash if I browse that dir containing the avi files.

I tried my own latptop, to my surprise, it crashes as well! (I normally use linux, so did not notice this before).

Google tells me that, codes conflict may be the cause. I uninstalled all codes packages, and install the codec pack all in 1, it backs to normal, finally.

At last, I have to revert the firewall changes and remove the user I created in his laptop.