I am pleased I have found such a wonderfully helpful site and would be very grateful for some assistance. I am trying to network 2 PCs back to back with an RJ45 cat5e crossover cable, a new XP laptop and an older 98 pc. I am using Realtek cards, which Windows is telling me are 'working properly'. I have just installed the very latest drivers for both. I have run the wizard on both and they have set up fine. But XP is telling me that the 'network cable is unplugged'. Connections are secure and I have tried a straight cable and even tried reversing the crossover cable. Also I have tried all 5 settings of 'Link Speed/Duplex Mode', but I still get that blasted red X in the corner. My 98 PC is happy, but it can't see the other one. Both will ping themselves on 127.0.0.1, and the 98 can ping itself on the IP address I get from ipconfig. They can't ping each other. Ipconfig on the XP gets me 'media disconnected', and if i do 'route print' on it I get 127.0.0.0 and 255.255.255.255 but nothing in the middle. This is driving me insane, I can see that others have the same problem, but nothing that worked for them worked for me. Please can someone help? Thanks Jonathan

two points to consider: 1. you need at least one common protocol installed on each machine 2. with your direct connection setup, windows networking requires both computers to have identical workgroup names, and unique computer names

Thanks, but I have TCP/IP on both machines, and my workroup is called WORKGROUP on both. The computers are called desktop and laptop. The computers can even ping themselves by name, but not each other.

I would double check and make sure you have the crossover pined correctly, If you still get the red X saying no connection its most likely a physical layer issue. Cable/NIC or Possibility of bad drivers. I would double check with some documentation to make sure you have the proper pins crossed on the cable. And possibly test both computers with a straitthrough to a hub or switch to see if that works, If that does, its likely its a bad crossover cable.

If you're using TCP/IP, assign a static private ip address to each machine, eg. 10.0.0.1 and 10.0.0.2 Then you can try pinging from one machine to the other using it's assigned IP address and see if it responds... If not then you should consider trying another crossover cable and/or network card driver as Tom mentioned. Most often the generic windows NIC NDIS drivers will work fine. If you can ping the loopback, then the NIC's are most likely not faulty. Good luck.

thanks, will try, please tell me though, do I assign those IP addresses in the TCP/IP properties in XP? and, does the subnet mask mean anything, should i make it 255.0.0.0 or somehting? thanks Jonathan

open the network and internet connections, right click on your network card connection, click properties.. select tcp/ip, click properties, click "use the following ip address type in your private static IP address & subnet mask.. - sure both computer's have a static IP address on the same subnet - the subnet mask should be 255.255.255.0 Hope this helps.