I just bought a D-Link 5-Port Ethernet Hubby DE-850TP. The guy at the store said it was easy to install, with the instruction inside. Unfortunately the instruction suck. So I was hoping someone could give me some advise on what I should do. What I have is a cable modem and would like to hook up 2 XP machines to it. Each machine can hook directly to the cable modem and they both work. Here is what I did so far! I connected the cable modem into the hub to port 1. I then connected my 2 computers to port 2 & 3. Then I go to the network setup wizard and follow the instruction. No luck, it seems to work however when I try to connect to the internet, its a no go. Any help would be appreciated here, thanks.

Hi...first off you are not using a DSL / cable router so you cannot connect the cable modem to the hub. I am not sure about Cable modem, but if it uses an Ethernet connection then you will need to use 2 NEtwork cards. The HOST PC should be the one with 2 NICs. One card goes to the hub via a straight cable and the other card goes to the modem. The ip address to the hub should be fixed (i.e. 192.168.1.10 and subnet mask 255.255.255.0) and the modem IP should be obtained automatically. The other PC(Client) should be connected to the hub via a straight cable too. One NIC only and IP fixed at 192.168.1.9 . After all these are done you must setup INternet connection sharing on the host PC only. setup the gateway for the client pc to the ip address of the host PC's NIC (the one connected to the hub) and you should be good to go. The draw back of such a setup is that the host pc have to be on for the client to access the internet.

If that doesn't work, try WinGate, at www.deerfeild.com. I'm using the same hub and had the same problems, until I got WinGate Home.

I got the D-Link network in a box kit thing [5 port switch, 2 cards etc] & it works fine - just had to fix up some registry issues on one of the computers [was 2nd hand from the government]. But I don't know what yours would run like. The thing contained Midpoint Lite which never worked the way it was meant to - so dunno what the go was there...