Windows 7: Windows 7 laptop can't access Vista Desktop on network

Hello everyone I'm new to the site as well as new to doing anything technical at all with computers. After googling and finding random pages that are from this site in the search engine for my issue I have caved in and made an account

Now then I see someone has posted a similar issue to mine but his seems more technical than mine. What's the issue you ask? I have a laptop that is running windows 7 and can view the document folder on my vista desktop but when I try to access it, it restricts me saying I don't have access. I removed the password being required to access files. I took off the shared wizard thing on the folder I want to access (on the vista desktop) that was recommended by another user on the site.

I still can't access the files on that computer but i can access from the desktop the files on my laptop (windows 7) both are on the same workgroup but I don't know what else to do.

Hi Makhra,

See if you can follow this Tutorial and compare your current networking setup, the Operating Systems are above Home Edition but it should have a few similarities. Here's another one that you may follow.

This tutorial has a step by step for setting up a network between Vista and Windows 7. Hope it helps.
How To Share Files and Printers Between Windows 7 and Vista - How-To Geek

Thanks for the link it was alot easier to read than the other Tutorials I have read but my problem still remains. Vista can access 7 but 7 can't access vista. I selected the folder on vista and right clicked>properties>and allowed sharing but 7 keeps teling me I don't have access.

It's annoying and I see from comments alot of people have this issue. Is there anything else I can do I should I just accept defeat

Do you have an antivirus or a third party firewall installed to either of these systems?

I have Norton on the Laptop that has windows 7...but this is the one that is having trouble accessing but not being accessed. The Desktop with vista had its firewalls turned off and I still couldn't get into the files

I would suspect that Norton is somehow causing this problem. There are ways to configure the Norton firewall that should allow for file access from your Windows 7 machine. I don't have Norton so can't give you the procedure for this.

Perhaps the Norton forums would give you the information on how to configure the Norton firewall so as to gain access to your other machines.