I've been trying for days to get this working, and everywhere I look online it seems no one has a definitive answer, so here is the run down:

I have an external drive attached to my ubuntu 12.04 machine, "nicholas-desktop." I have the entire drive shared over the network via SAMBA. If I try to access the drive from windows 7 by using "\nicholas-desktop" it fails saying it cannot locate "nicholas-desktop." However, if I use the current IP address assigned to my machine by my router's DHCP server by typing "\192.168.2.XXX" I have no problems accessing the share. if I try to ping my ubuntu machine's hostname from windows it fails. The same happens if I try to ping my windows machine, "nicholas-laptop" from my ubuntu machine. Again, if I use either machine's assigned IP address it works fine. Can someone please help me get this working? I don't want any workarounds like setting a static IP, or DHCP reservation, I want to be able to resolve hostnames from both sides. I have tried enabling SAMBA'a WINS server so I could resolve the hostnames using netBIOS, however that didn't work either, I may have made a mistake setting it up though.

Thanks for your time,

NCB