noob network question?

baum

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Frist off im new to the forum. I have been looking around it and find it interesting and helpful, so i decided to bite the bullet and become a member.

Anyways here is my situation: at home i use a laptop (with vista home premium) and a desktop (with xp pro). The laptop is currently set up with wireless in the house. Desktop is not hooked up to anything. What i would like to do is share the two with each other, but not share the laptop with the rest of the house (room mates share the wireless connection) Is this possible?

I hope you understand what i am trying to do.

Thanks,
 
You want to share the computers so they talk to one another or you want share the internet connection between the two. Not sure i fully follow what your trying to accomplish.
 
Probably the eaiest thing to do is to switch the workgroup on both to something random. Unless your roommate is great with computers, he won't be able to get at your shared stuff without changing his workgroup.
 
Im trying to share between the computers. dont want or need the internet on the desktop, but do on the laptop.
 
I'm not so good with network (thus why I'm taking a network class), but I have an idea and maybe some other members can develop on it. I think this is possible because I've seen it on a Netgear menu, however I do not know if you can do it while simultaneously keeping an internet connection (it is possible if you have a built-in wireless connector on the laptop and a plug-in one). What you want to do is setup a wireless ad-hoc (not sure on name) connection between your computer to your laptop. If you buy a Netgear wireless card I know for sure you can do this. Then if you have a second internet connection for your laptop you can keep connected to the internet. I second solution is to, everytime you need files on the computer, plug in a CAT5 crossover cable from the ethernet jack on your desktop to your laptop.
 
you either need a crossover cable, to set up an ad-hoc network, or just connect to the normal wireless on both and password protect each pc. i know on my vista premium and when i had xp pro my computer was protected by default, so i needed my windows user and pass when connecting from another pc. id probs do it this way, sharing will be much quicker. from experience i find ad-hoc is a little slower.
 
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