Networking two PC's

[Cam62]

Is it possible to "link" two pc's together without a hub via the network cards and an ethernet cable? I have two pc's running on Windows XP. One pc is on the Internet via a wireless card. It also has a ethernet card (which is unused). I want to use this pc as the main/host/server computer. The other computer has an ethernet card.

My problem is that the main computer that I want to use only shows the wireless connection in the device manager. It looks as though the ethernet card is disabled because of the wireless card even though it is in the pc. I do not need the second computer to access the internet...just want to use to share files between each other.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Cam

[Elbatrop1]

This is fairly easy to do. Just go to your local computer/electronics store and ask for a crossover ethernet cable.

Connect the 2 ethernet cards using the cable. The ethernet card on the main computer is showing it as disabled/inactive because there is no cable connected with anything on the other end of it.

Set up the IPs on each computer for their cards. For example, you could use 192.168.0.1 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 for one, and 192.168.0.2 with the same subnet mask for the other. That would alllow interconnectivity between the 2.

Once that is done, make sure that the user accounts on either computer have passwords. Then, make sure that they are in the same usergroup (right-click My Computer>Click Computer Name tab).

To potentially save some typing, do you know how to share files? And, does the above work so far for you?