XP Home and Networking

Can anyone help, I have a network set up with around 10 machines 3 of these machines are now running XP Home, the older machines have no trouble connecting to the network as soon as they start up. But the XP machines you have to go through map network drive.

Is there anyway for me to get the Xp machines to login in to the network as soon as it loads windows so that people will not have to map network drive everytime they start up the machine?

What's the exact problem with the XP home machines? What happens when you turn them on?

They turn on fine. The machines go to the desktop with no problem.

The problem is, that with previous versions of windows you could tell the os to map network drives, printers etc as soon as a user logs in. But with XP you have to map the network drive yourself, I was just wandering if there was a way that windows itself could do this task itself like in previous versions of windows, or if someone could show me how to do it using some third-party attempt for example creating a .bat file in the startup folder.

Actually there are a few thing you can do:

When you map a drive there is a check box that says reconnect at logon just check that box....

or

Create a simple batch file and place it in your start up as follows

net use f: \\server_name\share_name

or

You could just place shortcuts on your desktop pointing to the unc path instead of mapping a drive... like create a shortcut like \\server_name\share_name\

If you would also like to authenticate when connecting you could do a net search for a vbscript.

XP home edition is a little limited in the networking area..