Sharing Software and Resources over a Network in XP? Wacky situation/problem

[wjsulliv]

My friend works for a dentist?s office, where the dentist has just decided buy a USB X-Ray device. I don't fully understand all the details of how the device works, but it takes digital X-Rays and will store them on the computer.

Here is the set up-
The office has two rooms (call them 1 and 2). At the recommendation of the X-Ray device and software manufacturer he purchased two new Dell systems running XP Home (call them computer A and B). He placed computer A in room 1 and computer B in room 2. He then set them up on a simple home network with full read and write sharing access of both computers. Both computers see each other and share files correctly.

Here is what the company has been told him they can setup/do-
They intend to install the software on one computer (lets say computer A for example). They also intend for him to plug the X-Ray device into either computer A or B depending on which room he is in. If he is at computer A, the system should just work like a stand-alone system. However, if he is at computer B, they intend for him to open the software on computer A (which has been fully shared) over the network, plug in the X-Ray device to computer B, have X-Ray displayed on computer B, and store the X-Ray on computer A.

However-
When the guy showed up he couldn?t make anything work properly. In nearly 70 attempts to take a single picture, he only had one that was successful. The successful X-Ray was taken with the device connected to computer A, the same place the software was installed on. When they plugged it into computer B, running the software installed on computer A over the network, it completely failed. The guy then made some sort of excuse about XP, and updates.


My questions-
1) Can you even do this? Can software from computer A successfully run over the network on computer B, and capture USB image input?

2) Does the network have to be set up a special way to do this?

3) Is there a USB update for XP Home that would fix this?

Thanks

 

[CPORonin]

1) Can you even do this? Can software from computer A successfully run over the network on computer B, and capture USB image input?

Why not just install the X-ray software on both machines and keep all the images on one machine?

2) Does the network have to be set up a special way to do this?

It helps to have at least a 100mbit network when running remote applications, but I would think that a capture device would need locally installed software.

3) Is there a USB update for XP Home that would fix this?

Check the list here to see if there is anything specific to USB updates.

As far as I know unless you need USB2.0 support or are just having issues with USB on some devices there are no updates.

 

[wjsulliv]

Personally I would have installed the software on both machines and set up a sync'd folder to keep 2 copies of all the records incase of hard drive failure. However, the dentist is fairly opinionated, and seems to think, despite having almost no computer knowledge, that he knows best.