Networking Help

Hello I have been browsing this forum for the last few hours and have not yet found a solution for my problem and would really appreciate some help. I am very new to Macs, I bought a Mini yesterday and am attempting (read: failing) to set up my home network. Here is what I have:

Netgear WNDR3700 home network with a WPA2 wireless network.

A Windows 7 (completely updated) desktop with file sharing but not homegroup on. I have even deactivated my windows firewall while attempting to set this up.

A Mac Mini running OSX 10.4 with Windows Networking activated

I originally hoped to plug my mac mini in and, while I was quickly able to browse the web, I was less than successful in accessing my shared files that are on my windows 7 machine. I then deactivated the homegroup and simply "shared" the folders via right-clicking and sharing to all users on the network. I am unable to see the mac mini when opening up the network which was the first sign of trouble. I have all of the file sharing options on Windows 7 and Mac Mini checked (network discovery, etc.) but do not have any luck. The farthest success I have reached was I manually entered the ip of my windows 7 pc on the mac mini and while I saw the shared folders, they were empty.

Note: I do have identical user accounts set up between the two computers, with the same user name and no password.

I hope I provided enough information, feel free to let me know if you need anything else.

Thank you so much for any help you could provide!

 

Thank you for the suggestions, they are much appreciated. I successfully pinged the host as you suggested. I was also able to connect to the Win7 host using connect to server. It listed the shared folders, but when I open them up they contain no files. When I hit "get info" they even give me the correct amount of free and used space, but there are 0 objects.

 

Thanks for the follow-up. It comes back as {IP Address of Host}: Permission Denied, and goes onto list the volumes that are on my mac mini (my local hard drive and my external)

Is there something I need to do on the Windows 7 end in order to open this up then?

 

I have since tried to set up an FTP server to share instead, and even though I am following the instructions perfectly i still get a denial. There must be something wrong with my network connection on the mac end. Any tips and tricks would be really appreciated!