There's two ways you can do this. You can either set the permissions on some of the XP folders to "shared", which will allow you to access those folders/drives or you can use Remote Desktop Connection which will open your XP PC in a window on your laptop, this will give you almost as much control over your XP PC as you would have if you were sitting in front of it. You will need to have XP Pro installed and not the home version for this to work though. I've never used Vista, so I can't be too specific how to configure your laptop.

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Lawrence