pairing a mac to windows computer for sharing

Pairing a mac to windows computer for sharing password#

Get one of those, and forget about networking two different systems. They have really cheap USB sticks these days, some are bigger than hard drives. If all else fails (which I’m sure it will), a more drastic measure might be necessary.

Make sure neither computer is accidentally logged in to your phone’s WiFi hotspot or your neighbour’s network. It goes without saying that all machines need to be on the same network for this to work in principle.

repeat the steps to verify your IP address.

shutdown all the above, then start them one at a time.

It may take a moment for the Windows computer to show that the Mac is on the network.

Double-click the Mac, then enter the account name and password for the user account. On the Windows computer, open File Explorer, click Network, and locate the Mac you want to connect to. The only thing that I can suggest in such cases is: Have ready the name and password for the user account you’re using on your Mac for Windows sharing. Sometimes you may encounter your Mac being seemingly stuck on a little window, trying to connect to Windows for about 20 minutes or so, without ever being successful. We’re being kept deliberately guessing, because that’s what makes playing with computers so much “fun”. Could be literally anything: wrong mysterious setting somewhere, typo in your credentials, wrong day of the week, that sort of thing. What your Mac is trying to say here is that it is aware of an issue, but it’s not clever enough to tell you what it is. One such protocol that’s supported on both macOS and Windows is the Samba protocol. Think of the protocol as the language both systems have to speak to exchange data. You can do the same by heading over to Go – Connect To Server. On Your MacĬonnecting your Mac is actually pretty simple: in Finder, hit CMD + K to bring up a box that lets you connect to any server (local or remote) with a protocol and an IP address. To open it, click the search icon at the bottom left next to the start menu and type cmd. The command prompt on Windows is like the Terminal app on the Mac. For now, let’s make a note of that IP and head over to the Mac. To avoid such hassle, you can setup a static IP address – but I’ll leave this adventure for another time. A computer restart, or a router restart may change this. In my my case, that’s 10.0.1.85 – at least today it is. Pay attention to the IP that’s connected, under IPv4: You’ll get some details about your current network connection. To do this, open a command prompt and type ipconfig. The final thing we need to find out is our Windows IP address, so that we can connect to it from our Mac.

Pairing a mac to windows computer for sharing password#