Windows XP Hacks

Networking on the Cheap: Set Up a Direct Cable Connection

You don’t need a full-fledged network to connect two PCs using XP. Here’s how to create a fast, cheap connection that’s great for sharing files and other network needs.

If you are reading this book, which is (as you know) called Windows XP Hacks, then you probably get questions and pleas for help from your friends and family all the time (or you will, now that you’ve read the book!). You’re the “computer guy” (women can be computer guys too, my female editor tells me) and you have the ability to “make it better.” If that’s a fair assessment of your situation, let’s go through a scenario that happens to us hacker-types quite often.

It’s 8:00 on a Sunday evening, and the phone rings. Your neighbor is panicking, because his computer is acting crazy and he just finished working on a huge PowerPoint presentation for work the next day. You grab your trusty laptop and your bag of computer parts and go next door.

You sit down at the computer and play with it a bit. Sure enough, it’s got problems. The CD burner doesn’t work, and the floppy drive is shredding disks. How’s he going to transfer his file to his work machine? He doesn’t have a dial-up account or Internet access, so you can’t upload his file somewhere and download it to your computer—or perhaps it’s just too big for his 28.8 bps modem to send.

Lucky for you (and for him), he’s running Windows XP and so are you. Since you’ve read this book, you have exactly what you need ...