I'm trying to help my parents with their Spark HG630b router.

A bit of background on the funny setup we have - I've just built them a brand spanking new pc to replace their near on ten year old xp pc.  It turns out they have an accounting package on their old pc that costs hundreds of dollars to replace so we decided it was best to keep the old pc for the few times a year my father uses it. At the same time as this, my parents bought a new smart tv that they wish to stream lightbox on, so we upgraded them to vdsl (no fibre yet... sigh) and moved the connection and new router to the center of the house. So now we're connecting their old and new pc's to the router via wireless dongles. To try and save space I have tried to be smart and let them remote desktop onto their old pc from their new one.

Now here is the problem, for some strange reason, I cannot ping between the two pc's using the machine name, instead I have to use the IP address - the same applies for connecting via remote desktop. After trying for hours to get this to work, I thought I would just reserve the local ip addresses and just save the ip address in a remote desktop shortcut.... but I cannot seem to find a way to do this. I'm sure the problem must be between the seat and keyboard, but for the life of me I cannot find any options to do this, and I cannot find any instructions online to do this. I even tried to save the ip addresses as static ip addresses (below the dynamic range of 192.168.1.65 that the router allocates new connections to) - this worked great apart from it stopped the computers accessing the internet full stop.

So as it stands, whenever my father wants to access his accounting package I have to drive over and reconnect his pc up. I never thought I would see a worse router than their old thomson router telecom gave them, but this one trumps that and then some. This router is an utter turd, and it is incredibly poor that any ISP could ever ship such a piece of garbage out, the old d-links were a hundred times easier to use despite their limitations.

Well, now my rant is out of the way, one other thing I should mention is that originally both pc's had the same computer name which caused obvious issues, so I renamed the new pc, but I wouldn't expect this to cause any issues anymore.

I'm no expert on routing, but I can usually fumble my way around a router - but this one has left me stumped. I'm tempted to get them to buy a new router - or alternatively change providers to a company that doesn't send out such terrible bits of hardware

ps - sorry for being negative and grumpy, spending hours on this sort of problem tests my temper.