Transferring my music via home network

Okay well I have recently gotten a thinkpad t61 for my first year away at school and wanted to transfer my music from our desktop to my notebook, I was able to connect the two after a bit of trouble through Windows Media Player and our Desktop is an option at the bottom of the bar on the left (where it says library and all that) so I clicked there and all the music is there so I thought I would be able to just drag and drop those songs into the library on my notebook but it did not work. All I was able to do was save ALL the songs as a playlist on my notebook.

Is there any other way via our home network I can transfer the music into my 'My Music' folder? Thanks so much for the help.

 

The easiest way - get a jump drive and copy the files from the desktop to the jump drive, then copy from the jump drive to the laptop.

 

How have you got the two computers hooked together?

If they're both on the same subnetwork, then just share the "My Music" folder on one of the computers, go to the other, open up both its "My Music" folder and the shared "My Music" folder, then select all of the music files you want to move over, and drag and drop them into the shared "My Music" folder for the other computer.

Once the copying is done, turn off the sharing feature.

 

How much will a Jump drive cost me? I'm going away to school and don't have a lot of money to spend.

Well I'm not entirely sure how to answer your question, we have a wireless/wired router so my laptop connects to the internet wirelessly while our desktop is wired to the router and I just went through the windows options to connect them via a network. I think I may have done what you mentioned or I am just mixing it up due to wording, what I did was go on my desktop and open the shared folders file on there and drag the desktops my music folder into it. But now that I type that I think what your saying is drag the copied my music from the desktop into the folder/file for my laptops shared music file?

 

Nevermind lol, a case of different terms, I didn't know flash drives were also called jump drives.

 

If you enable file and print sharing on both machines you should be able to navigate to \\thinkpad (where thinkpad is the name of the computer - if the computer was nammed computer111 it would be \\computer111) and paste the files there.

 

Okay so I have tried what has been suggested and I realized on my desktop none of the computers on the network are showing up. But when I look at the computers on the network I see them all including the desktop. Could it be because the desktop is running XP and not Vista?

I think I will end up just using a jump drive as suggusted when I can get my hands on one.

 

Could be. Have you downloaded and installed onto the XP machine the Link Layer Topology Discovery Responder from Microsoft?

If not, do so - _Vista machines use a different method to "see" networks and their devices than do XP machines, and, as is usual from Microsoft, without the LLTDR, a _Vista machine has a hard time "seeing" an _XP machine.

Now, obviously, your problem is the reverse; still, it doesn't hurt to start with the knowns before we venture off in search of the unknowns.

Transferring your files by sneaker-net is probably the simplest (and fastest) way to go; however, it sounds as if your network is less than optimal right now, and it might be worthwhile spending the time to improve it now that you've found a specific deficiency that's stopped you from doing something you wanted.