Managing a home PC network

I have a typical home network with a Wireless DSL Router, 2 XP PCs and a Network Hard disk and a wireless Photo frame all connected.
My question is, is there some way to get an overview of all attached devices? I am looking for a built in tool in XP or, if that is not available, a separate application where I can "see" what is attached and how in a diagram or tree view. I would also expect to navigate the attached devices an view any 'shared' data.

Side note: Is such a thing built in to OSX or KDE/Linux?

not sure if its the best way but its how ours work .
On each of your pc's go to the start menu pen up your network control
then should be able to view the devices on your network
if you want to actively share files from one pc to the other open up the my computor
panal open up your inbuilt drive and right click on the folders you would like to share on the
network and then set the sharing permissions up that way when on one pc you can view and use the
contents on the shared files on the other.
alternitivly if your if you want run one pc from the other you will need somthing like norton ghost.
i hope this was not to mindnumbing simple but i am no network genius.
otherwise ditch Xp and get the new linux ubuntu its nice and fast and a pleasure to use

Network Magic Pro or HomeNet Manager

Thanks. It seems that there is no built in way to do it then. I tried Ubuntu last year but it did not seem to have tools that were easy to do this. And if you asked for help on the forums they would only suggest using text commands, having no knowledge of such tools.
I'll give the Network Map application a try.

It depends what you mean by 'connected'. In a typical home LAN everything is connected to everything else through a router or switch so a diagram doesn't add much value. If you want to see all active devices then log on to your router and see which IP addresses its DHCP server has handed out. If you don't understand that much then you probably won't be able to configure a tool to present that information graphically (even if it exists) - a certain minimum understanding of what is going on is essential even for that.

Network admin on Linux is still the domain of those who enjoy command line tools, and frankly they're still the best way to do it. SUSE has YaST which makes starting network services like NFS or Samba fairly easy. Other linux distributions have similar tools but they won't help for configuring or viewing subnets or the like.

"Angry IP Scanner" would do a lot of that, and it's free. Google it and you should be able to find. I used to use it for performing basic network audits.

Thanks. Both Network Map and Angry IP show me the attached devices. Network Map lays them out with a description and shows how they are connected. I did not have to "learn" to use them.

I stand corrected, it appears that Angry IP scanner might actually show some useful information. For Linux too. Amazing!

Its good. Its a shame Windows lacks such a thing built in in a logical place.
I'd really hoped to be able to see the attached devices when I expand the "My Network" branch of the explorer tree. And then to further expand the tree for each attached device to see the shared data.

The problem with that sort of information is it's very difficult to come by. Any application can open a private communication channel with any device it likes on any port it likes and only something akin to a firewall has that sort of information available to it - there may be no shared data, ie. files on a hard disk, as such just exchanged TCP or UDP messages. I'll have a closer look at Angry IP in the next few days to see what it gathers but I'd imagine it would be pretty easy for a device to remain hidden from its output if it so wanted.

What is your motivation for wanting this information? If you are concerned about network security then this is probably the wrong way to go...

No. I just want an easy way to see if something is connected, and then exchange data to/from it. But I'd rather not need lots of different applications to do it.
This is what the (free) Net Map application suggested by Guy displays. I can now see that my Kodak Photo Frame is successfully attached. And that my router is connected to the internet and that the other PC is connected too. But it does not allow me to drag files to shared folders on the other PC or the photo frame.