macbook tiger + windows 2K networking problems

[George Harrison]

Hello, I just got my new macbook today through fedex and I'll admit that I'm pretty giddy over it. I was testing the apps, playing my Godfather dvd, etc. it was a lot of fun. Now to the question..

I'm on a LAN connection with ethernet cords on the floor basically and it's all hooked up to three desktop pc's all running windows 2000. All three pc's are on the same network/workgroup and they can all "talk" to each other. So I bring my macbook upstairs and hook it up through the RJ-45 into a free spot on the switch, which then hooks up to the router. I fired up Safari and iChat and started enjoying the rest of my new MB. The last step was to connect to my box (or the network in general I guess) and take my iTunes dir. and put it on my mac hdd so I could have a library with my iPod that I've had for about a year now and is windows formatted. I could not (cannot) for the life of me connect to my network. I have googled, I have read tutorials, I have followed all the steps.. nothing works, although all the guides I have read were for XP I think.

This is really driving me crazy because I can get onto the internet just fine but both sides are not on speaking terms at the moment. Is there something with Windows 2K that doesn't correspond to XP? I know they are all NT-based but I guess there could be something different. I consider myself to be decent at networking and I am a long time user of windows 9x/NT, GNU/Linux, and *BSD. I would really just like to get my iTunes stuff and happily carry on my business. I tried to transfer the songs over to an external hdd but something screwed up and said it had the wrong path name and then stopped at 2 out of 8GB of music or something. that's windows for you..

Well thanks to whoever sat through my speech and hopefully I can get some help over here. I would most certainly appreciate it.

 

[George Harrison]

update

The macbook assigned itself a new IP for no particular reason... so now I cannot browse the internet, let alone connect on my windows 2K machine (although I read another guide and it seems clearer now). I went into the network manager and went with manual settings, note that I'm used to doing this with linux distros like debian and gentoo, I even got to a green light on the main network config page for built in ethernet but it was still a no go for the ping. Now I'm pretty mad and the battery has basically ran itself out by this point so I'm going to go recharge it and then probably bring it to starbucks in the morning so I can use a public wifi router and see if it at least responds to that.

One note.. everything was working fine for the internet before I ate dinner, then afterwards I came upstairs to wake it out of the sleep mode I had put it in. I then logged out thinking that could be a possible solution and then it froze more or less. Figuring that I could prolly reset it I kept my finger firmly pressed on the power button until it shut itself off. Then I restarted it and then the problems came about; namely the machine assigns itself a new IP address and now a network is nonexistant.

It's still going through DHCP. Did my ISP wise up and see it was a new device so they changed it? Also, it no longer lists the router IP which I know off hand so I tried to put it in manually but it didn't like it. Well I've talked enough, some advice would be kindly accepted. thanks.