I have pcs and macs networked at home for years.
I use a mac as a router tho using "ipnetrouter" and a 16 port hub.
so instead of a little box I have a whole computer acting as a router.
I installed a dlink 108 mpbs 4 port plus wireless at my last clients business and it was fairly straight forward activating the wireless component and setting up the ethernet.
with most new routers you need to access the ip address from a webpage on any machine thats connected to it. eg: http:192.168.0.1
then use a username :admin and password : admin.
change this as soon as you get it setup.
from here you can switch on and off the festures you need.
if your making your own ethernet cables and are trying to be neat by making a really small cable forget it. any cable shorter then about a meter just wont work due to the nature of ethernet.
I made about 3 short cables until a network guru told me that tidbit.
if your mac is osx and you want to file share then you need to issue the command from the go pull down menu smb://yourpcsipaddress.
in order for this to work you have to make a folder with full access on your pc shared and turn off your firewall.
if your on a mac with prior to osx eg: 9.2 / 9.1 / 8.6 / 8.5 you can use a program called "Dave".
both mac flavours of OS and pcs can all be set with ip adresses or set to dhcp. I prefer to have manual ip addresses for each time u want to file share u have to know the new ip with dhcp.
the macs control panel tcp prior to osx and network control panel in osx is where u set this information. the appletalk control panel needs to be set to ethernet as well in prior to osx Oses.
this link is for older mac setups.
http://www.homepcnetwork.com/pcmacp1s2f.htm
this link is for 9.1
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,479,00.asp
this link shows alternatives
http://www.practicallynetworked.com/sharing/macnpc.htm
this looks like a good webpage about the subject
http://www.kan.org/networking/quicknet.html
if you have mac disks like cdroms u want to open on your pc i use a program called tranzmac, it works very well as an alternative to networking large amounts of data because its a little quicker just to jam in the cdrom in your pc and copy the info.
hope that helps.
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