Net send command question

I recently set up a home network of 3 win XP home edition PC's and went to cmd and tried the net send <username> the message command and its not working, is it because i am not using win XP pro?

i even tried to net send something to myself and it says "net alias could not be found on the network" but when i type net users it shows my name on there.

does captialization matter?

I just simply want to be able to send a message to another computer on my network by using CMD's net send command, all PC's can see the shared drives but not the users

thanks!

 

its net send computer name, and sp2 and later have this disabled by default. start run net start messenger should reenable this.

 

i see so net send <computername> <msg i want to send>
instead of net send <username> <msg>

do i need to run net start command on both PC's trying to communicate?

or just mine?

I have SP3, thanks!!

 

any machine that supposed to recieve a message. Do except popups because net messenger is abused.

 

Are you able to ping the computer name you are trying to send the message to?... Is the name being resolved to an IP address? You could try performing the "net send" to the IP address of the destination computer, rather than the hostname or user. Also, as Colemanguy pointed out, verify that the "Messenger" service is running on both the source and destination computer. Performing a "net send" to a user name may only work in a domain environment and not for local user accounts, as I am uncertain how a local user name on a workstation would be identified by "net send".