Man I've got a lot of work tonight...

Well my papa got a new comp, so I’m happy. yays Our old one is still useable, so mom’s going to figure out a way to get both comps connected to the cable line. I doubt networking would work, but who knows? Dad’s comp runs XP, old runs 98.

But ah well. Now I hve to hunt for all of my stuff and reinstall it. Yay. Not to mention recollect my favorites. This is going to be lovely…

<img src=“http://www.rpgclassics.com/staff/tenchimaru/td.gif”> We have an XP/98 SE network here as well. Basically, I have my DSL into the XP comp, and am in a small network with the 98 SE one by means of a crossover cable.

Yeah, a twisted TP-cable would work. Since they both run shudder NetBIOS, it shouldn’t be any problems.

Just remember that you might have to set the IP address of the machine yourself.

How would I go about it, and what equipment would I need?

A goos tart is having a LAN board in each computer. The one with the cable already uses one of these to connect to the internet.

I suggest using XP on both computers, for I once tried to get my two computers in a LAN being one of them XP and the other 98. 98 could puppeteer XP, but Xp couldn’t even see 98 (at best, he’d ping the other comp’s LAN board)

Oh wait… You want to connect to the internet as well with both PCs?

  1. Get a hub (or better yet, switch) and 4 TP cables
  2. Get a router/firewall that supports NAT (most ones do)
  3. Plug in the router, and connect them all like this:

      +----Internet
      |
     <R>
      |
 +---[S]---+
 |         |
PC         PC

<R> - Router
[S] - Switch/Hub
PC - PC (duh! =P)
Internet - Internet

It’d be better if you could just get two different IP addresses though. Ask if you can have an additional one from your ISP, or if your supports IPv6, and if they do, use that instead (you’d need some sort of additional software for the 98 PC for that however).

Asking for another IP from your ISP like Wert suggests is totally idiotic, it’ll almost certainly cost you extra and you gain nothing from it.

The cheapest and simplest way to get a small network running is to just buy a 4 port router and plug both PCs into it. Most modern routers also double as switchesso while many people do buy a hub/switch you don’t actually need one.

    +----Internet
    |

±–[R]—+
| |
PC PC

Win Xp/98 are perfectly capable of working together in a network just make sure that you set both machines on “obtain an ip automatically” (That’ll probably give you 192.168.1.100 and 192.168.1.101) and that your workgroup name is set to WORKGROUP Doing those two things will eliminate about 80% of problems when setting up an Xp/98 network.