Imagine you have a two or even three story house and your office is setup in the basement. Well you have been working on a file for work upstairs on your laptop and now you realize that you have to print it but the printer is connected to the desktop in the basement. So what do you do, you copy the file to a disk and then walk downstairs and copy it to the desktop to print it out. This is what we call Sneaker-Net and it is the oldest way of sharing files and printers.

Well we have the ability to network these computers and printers so that they all work in harmony. I am first going to describe the easiest (and most expensive) way to network all your computers and share a high speed Internet connection. Then I will explain the middle of the road solution to networking your computers, and lastly I will discuss the cheapest way to network your computers. So lets get started.

Installing a Router
I wrote above that this was going to be the most expensive and it will be but keep in mind that by expensive I mean around $70 to $100 if even that much. What you will need to purchase if a router and you can pick these up at any electronics store in your area. Any model will work just fine and the style you get can depend on your price range. Linksys Wireless Routers are one of the leaders in networking devices. Another good name is networking devices is Netgear Wireless Routers which makes top of the line equipment as well. Either of these will suit your needs just fine, just make sure that you purchase a “Router” with all the different networking equipment these vendors sell is it easy to purchase the wrong item. Now you can literally just read the instructions to the router once you have purchased it and you should be up and running. But in case you are curious I will continue with a generic setup for a router.

Pretty much all routers are plug and play and very easy to setup. First thing you will want to do is to connect a network cable from your DSL router, Cable modem, or Satellite to the port on the back of the router that is separated from the rest of the ports. If you don’t see one that is separated then look for one that is labeled “Internet” or “WAN“. Once that is connected you will want to connect a network cable from each computer into a port on the back of the router. Most routers will pretty much setup your network for you by giving each computer a DHCP address configuration. This means all you have to do is to plug the computers into the router and everything else is done for you. If you want to know the actual mechanics of it please read my articles on subnetting and how networks work. The easiest way to test and make sure everything worked properly is to Click Start >> Run and then type “CMD” which will open up a black window with a c:\> prompt. Now just type “ipconfig” and press enter and you will see your ip address, which should be something like 192.168.1.101. Do the same thing on the other computer and then do a ping against each other. Which means in the same window you typed ipconfig type “ping
” and you should get a reply back, assuming everything is working properly and you don’t have and firewall settings that are blocking pings. If everything works properly then you have just networked two computers together. For more information on sharing files and printers please read my File and Printer sharing article.

Now we will go over a slightly less expensive option and that is simply putting a switch in place instead of a router. The difference in configuration is that a switch will not hand out address information to the computers so we will have to configure that manually. Otherwise the setup is the same in that all you have to do is to plug the two computers into the switch with a network cable. To configure these computers since the switch won’t do it for us.

• Click Start, Click Control Panel, click Network and Internet Connections, Click Network Connections
• Right Click the network connection you want to configure (will normally be “local area connection”) and then click properties
• On the general tab, scroll down until you see “Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). Select it and click Properties
• Click the radio button that says “Use the following IP address:”
• For IP Address: type 192.168.2.100
• For Subnet Mask: type 255.255.255.0
• You can leave gateway blank here
• You can also leave the DNS server blank too

Now for the second computer do the exact same steps except for IP Address type 192.168.2.101. Now from the second computer Click start, click run, then type “CMD” and press enter. A black screen should pop up. Now we will try to ping computer 1 by typing 192.168.2.100. If we get a reply back then we know everything is working properly assuming you don’t have a firewall configured to block ping requests. If everything is working properly then you will have successfully networks two computers using just a switch, congratulations.

Now we will go over the cheapest way of networking two computers together. We will use what is called a crossover cable. Ok techie time where I take side note to explain cables for a minute. A standard CAT5, CAT5e, and CAT6 cable have 8 wires in them and when connected to a computer the computer will transmit signal on wires 1 and 2 and receive signal on wires 3 and 6. The regular cables that we were using in the above scenarios were regular straight thru cable. Which means that cable 1 on one end will go to cable one on the other end. The switch or router will flip this cable so that the other computer receives the information on its receiving wires. Well is we are not going to be using a hub or a router then we will have to flip these cables our self (or obviously the easier solution to just buy one but what fun is that). When we make the cable we will have to connect wire 1 to wire 3, wire 2 to wire 6, wire 3 to wire 1, and wire 6 to wire 2.

 TX+ 1 -------------- 3 RX+ TX- 2 -------------- 6 RX- RX+ 3 -------------- 1 TX+ RX- 6 -------------- 3 TX-

Now if the cable is created (or bought) properly then you should be able to plug one end into each computer and get a little light on both computers (that is a good sign). To configure these computers we will have to do the same thing we did with the switch option above.

• Click Start, Click Control Panel, click Network and Internet Connections, Click Network Connections
• Right Click the network connection you want to configure (will normally be “local area connection”) and then click properties
• On the general tab, scroll down until you see “Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). Select it and click Properties
• Click the radio button that says “Use the following IP address:”
• For IP Address: type 192.168.2.100
• For Subnet Mask: type 255.255.255.0
• You can leave gateway blank here
• You can also leave the DNS server blank too

Now for the second computer do the exact same steps except for IP Address type 192.168.2.101. Now from the second computer Click start, click run, then type “CMD” and press enter. A black screen should pop up. Now we will try to ping computer 1 by typing 192.168.2.100. If we get a reply back then we know everything is working properly assuming you don’t have a firewall configured to block ping requests. If everything is working properly then you will have successfully networks two computers using just a crossover cable, congratulations. There are many more configurations you can do once you have your computers networked together properly. So play with the settings and see what else you can get to work.