How do I setup my WD MYBOOK ES to use on my wireless network ?

You can't share the WD MYBOOK ES without connecting it to one of your existing computers. Connect it to a desktop or a computer that you will have running all of the time or that you can leave running all of the time. Once it's connected, if you are using Windows XP, go to "My Computer", right click on the drive that is showing in "My Computer" as the newly connected drive. More than likely it will be the last drive that shows in the list. Right click on it and go to "Sharing and Security ...". A new window will pop up. You should be on the sharing tab, if not navigate to the sharing tab. Select the "Share this folder" radio button. Click on the "OK" button to save your changes. Make sure your windows firewall or whatever firewall software you are using will allow your other computers to access the new share.

My sugestion would be to turn all of the computers on the network off and the router off. Now turn the router on first and then one by one turn on the computers. Go to a computer which you will want to access the newly shared WD MYBOOK ES external hard drive and enter in "//computername" where "computername" is the name of the computer the WD MYBOOK ES is connected to. You should see the WD MYBOOK ES as a folder that you can click on and access all of the files on the WD MYBOOK ES. Here's a hint, Once you've entered "//computername" and you see the shared folder, right click on it and choose "Map Network Drive ...", click on the "Finish" button and now you can access the WD MYBOOK ES hard drive over your network as if it was attached locally to your computer. Hope this helps and let me know if you have any problems/questions.

You can't have a totally wireless connection without a router, but you can access the internet from both laptops at the same time. You need to cable one of the laptops to the modem, then set up the pc to act as a gateway. The wireless cards on both PC's will need to be given hard-coded IP addresses. The gateway PC will need to be powered on in order for the wireless connection to work.

If this is a plain external hard drive, you'll need to connect it into one of your machines & then share it. The others can then connect to it by it's sharename, eg. \\PC1\Shared_Drive

If it is NAS ( Network Addressable Storage ) ...

Check on your router to confirm what IP range it is distributing to DHCP clients. Set a reservation for of the last IP in the range used, or, reduce that range by 1 if you can't reserver IPs. This last IP we will use for you NAS unit.

The NAS unit will have a default IP given in the setup instructions ( maybe 192.168.1.1 ). Configure one of your machines with an IP in the same range & access the NAS' web management page. Configure the NAS to use the IP you reserved earlier on your router.

Switch the machine who's IP you changed back to DHCP, or whatever IP it had static in it's settings.

You should now be able to browse to the NAS management page using the IP you set on it.

Create a share via the NAS' management web page & set security permission.

That should be it, access the share from your clients. Assuming a reserved IP of 10.1.1.10 & sharename set as data ...... \\10.1.1.10\data <enter>

You can't. You need the World Book version that has a built in wireless adpater to do what you would like to.