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Down To Earth Networking Help and Tips for The Home Networking User

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Networking 2 Computers
The Easy Way!

The simplest way of networking 2 computers is just to have a cable wire going from computer one to computer two.

This might be something you would do in a situation like you have in the figure below…

You have a desktop machine and you have a laptop where you periodically need to connect to transfer files or do some back up etc…

The way you accomplish networking 2 computers together is with what is knows as a cross over cable. When you purchase one, you will see it emphasized on the package usually with the words “Crossover” indicating that it is indeed a cross over cable as seen in figure below.

This wire is only used for particular application and here is how it works:

The actual cable has two sets or pairs of wires that are used to communicate and exchange information between 2 computers. Remember the phone analogy we used in networking basic? Well it is similar to that, one pair of wires are used to transmit information, like the mouth piece of your phone, and the other is used to received information like the ear piece of your phone.

So why are they called crossover wires?

Well not that you really need to know this in order to start networking 2 computers unless of course you are making the wires yourself. But here it is anyway.

Or if you are not interested, just fast forward to next section…

They are called crossover wires because the wires are taking the receiving end of your wires and connecting to the transmitting end of the other computer and the transmitting end of your computer is connected to, yup you got it, the receiving end of their computer. So you have a crossover effect that takes place in the wires. I wonder how hard it was to come up with that name!

Maybe a figure is in order here…

Now, when you start networking 2 computers together, both computers will also need an NIC (network interface card) also known as a Ethernet card. It could also be built into your computer system. If you look at the back of your computer you will see something that looks like a large telephone jack as shown in the figure below.

As you can see they look similar but the Ethernet crossover cable will not fit into the phone jack port because it is to wide. But it does fit nicely into the Ethernet port and you will usually hear a click when is seated properly.

So are you ready to start networking 2 computers? Ok, here we go…

Connect one end of the Ethernet cable to computer one, and then connect the other end of the Ethernet cable to computer two’s Ethernet port. If the computers are on, you will usually see the lights start blinking indicating that there is a connection.

That is it; we now have established the lowest level of connectivity!

Now you are ready to go to the next level!

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