Setting up a home network should be easy. And as Microsoft would have you believe; is as easy as clipping your toenails or shitting yourself after a night of drink and vindaloo. So, being lucky enough to own the following ingredients:

1 Desktop PC
1 Laptop
2 Wireless network cards
1 Wireless broadband internet router
2 Copies of Windows XP sp2

Throw everything into a pot, boil for 12 hours then throw it all in the bin because it's a pile of shit. Well, as it happened I got the wireless broadband up and running after a few false starts due mainly to windows being a little misleading and WEP keys being 26 random numbers long (Security, I've nothing worth stealing so why do I bother?). And thinking to myself that I've got that up and running well, I'll try and get my media working on my Xbox 360. Same deal, run a few wizards, install the latest version of windows media player and change a few options and then... nothing.

My Xbox with its puny 20 gig hard drive (Which is really only 13 gigs btw) can happily let me kill my friends, and strangers online, won't recognise that I own a pc sitting not 3 meters from it so I can listen to a little Prokofiev while I'm offing my friends.

Right, I think to myself, I must have to set up a home network type of thing and here is where we come to the crux of my problem (You may have noticed from earlier). I run the wizards on the pc and the laptop and windows swears to me, crosses it's heart and hopes to die, that there is a home network now set up, stubbornly refuses to detect any of the other computers on it. No matter what fiddling i do with my network settings and firewall settings, windows is having none of it.

So, off to the Internet and the Microsoft knowledge base and other various sites to be found through the wonders of Google. And what do i find everywhere I go? The same ten steps originally published by Microsoft and wanked over by just about everyone else is a sadistic game of soggy biscuits that would make any retarded school kid happy. Fortunately for me I'm not a retarded school kid, those days have long passed. However having to suffer it doesn't exactly send me into a thrall of Internet manmeat heaven the likes of which Microsoft so clearly enjoys.

The first nine steps all involve, and I kid you not, buying the hardware, installing it (please refer to the manufacturers guides) and generally toss potting around with stuff that must also clearly be already set up for me to have first accessed the Internet to be reading the very file professing to help me. Hmmmm, something is amiss here. And gloriously, the cherry on the cake, the tenth step is simply, run the wizards and everything will be fine.

I had already run the wizards, nothing was fine and I was very irritated. You also may have noticed that. And for you MAC fans out there I actually like XP, on the whole so don't try and turn me, I will just ignore you and your overpriced underpowered shiny machines.

Don't take this to seriously and if you are offended by it, well, tough luck. I can't see why you would be but then the world is a strange place though that's just my honored opinion. I hope you enjoyed reading this rant as much as I did writing it.

Anyone have any similar problems or perhaps ideas on how to get it working?