[nfbcs] Networking Solutions?

[John G. Heim]

I see you've gotten a lot of answers but IMO, this is a hardware question.
What kind of hardware do you have to connect these 2 PCs? Did your internet
service provider give you a wireless access point? Sometimes they supply a
modem with more than one Ethernet port.  If so, you're good to go. My ISP
just supplies a modem with a single port, which is fine for me because I
prefer to do my own networking. If your ISP just gave you a plain modem with
one port, you need to buy a network switch or a wireless access point. Once
you have the PCs on the same local area network, you can use the networking
tools built into Windows to share files. 

I'm guessing that if your ISP had given you a wireless access point or
network switch, you wouldn't be asking this question.  You might consider
calling your ISP and asking them to send you one or the other. It can be
hard to get stuff like that out of them tese days because they know how hard
it is to switch to another provider. But its worth a shot. Otherwise, you
have to decide whether you are going to connect your machines via a wired or
wireless connection. Personally, I ran wires throughout my house so all my
computers can use wired connections. The only time I do wireless is with my
IPod. A wired connection provides speeds about a thousand times faster than
wireless so I generally do my web browsing and email on a machine with a
wired connection.  But I routinely do skype and stream public radio on my
IPod.

On my network, I run a mail server so I can pull down my mail from all my
different accounts and access it in one place  from anywhere in the world. I
do file sharing. And I even run a web server and a streaming media server. I
do all this via linux but you can do the same thing with Windows.  You don't
have to get this elaborate, of course. You can start with file sharing once
you get the PCs on the same LAN. Google for tutorials on file sharing in
Windows. There's lots of them. I don't think you're going to have problems
figuring out how to share files once you get the 2 computers connected. 

-----Original Message-----
From: nfbcs [mailto:nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Jim Portillo
Sent: Sunday, October 07, 2012 12:35 AM
To: Jim Portillo
Subject: [nfbcs] Networking Solutions?

Hi there,

 

I'm beginning to toy with a thought and wondered what kinds of solutions you
guys might have.

 

I have two computers, and I use both of them for different things; although,
one is older and has a different system than the other.  Nonetheless, they
both have certain programs and files they share or should share.

 

I wonder if there's a way to have both computers on some kind of small
network to where they can share information with one another, or to where I
can access information from either computer, no matter what.  Does that make
any sense, and is this a doable thing?  Of course, businesses have large
networks that can do this, but what about small homes?

 

What are some thoughts?

Jim

 

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