Iam curious and I think I already know the answer is probably NO ,I have two PC's my old P3 750MMHz running Windows Me(they sit side by side in my home office) ,which I have tweaked the O/S and its very stable and my kids use it daily to access the internet via dial up ISP ,and then I have my one year old XPS400 a Dell with a 2.8 G.B. Dual Core Proccessor 2 G.B. of DDR2 RAM .By the way the old P3 750MHz has 256M.B. SDRAM a 30 G.B. hard drive 5400rpm with 24 G.B.'s available ,the Dell has a 250 G.B. 7200RPM Hard Drive with 213 G.B. available . At this time I also access the internet with the Dell using a dial up adapter ,both machines have a 56K V90 modem .Iam going to switch my internet service to cable via comcast very soon and was wondering just for internet access if I can network these two PC's ,they would not be doing any file sharing ,the only thing I would want to run the PC's thru one cable ,hopefuly by networking them together ! If yes what equipment would I need ,if I must I can do a XP upgrade on the P3 ,however I rather not since its running so well with WinMe ! I have installed graphic cards added RAM (which is like changing a light bulb) installed a sound card a TV Tuner PCI card,a internial CD-RW drive ,so Iam not afaid to open the tower and work inside a PC ,Iam good at following directions .I performed a fresh install of O/S on the Dell and have troubleshot alot of PC errors out of both my PC's and as of now they both run great ,the Dell running WinXP MCE 2005 reports no errors in the application catagorey of the event viewer , just a couple of weeks ago I had a few errors everytime I was on PC and now thru folowing links reading information via google searches Iam able to fix it seems almost any PC prob ,I have even worked in DOS on my old P3 ! Anyway merry X-Mas to evryone ,been coming to computing.net for 8 years and its always been a great web site for answers and help with PC probs ! Thank You to All Nick Ricci

Iam going to switch my internet service to cable via comcast very soon and was wondering just for internet access if I can network these two PC's ,they would not be doing any file sharing ,the only thing I would want to run the PC's thru one cable ,hopefuly by networking them together ! Yes, buy a SOHO router with 4 LAN (local area network) ports. Plug the cable coming from the cable modem into the WAN port of the router and plug both PC's into LAN ports. Go through the setup guide for the router and all should work properly provided your PC's are set to get their TCP/IP settings from DHCP (NOTE: both PC's will require a NIC - network interface card) if they don't already have built in network interfaces on the motherboard)

You can also take a look on this Ethernet home network setup tutorial if you like. Hope helps..

Internet connection sharing on the xp machine. It won't cost you anything. You will need a crossover cable though. They are easy to make. The xp box will also need to be powered on for the other machine to have internet access. Just google internet connection sharing.

Thanks for the info on networking justdaniel , I find your post to me refreshing and reassuring ,I have this intense fear of my 13year old and eleven year old using my new PC ,and they keep trying . My daughter just recieved a digitial camera for X-Mas and sure enough the only O/S it will work on is WinXP , so I may have to upgrade my P3 750MHz from WinMe(30G.B.hard drive with 22 G.B. available)to WinXP which so far with all of my tweaking has run pefectly for 8 years (that's the WinMe system), now my new PC a 2.8 G.B. Dual Core 2G.B.DDR2 RAM and a 250 G.B. H.D. is running WinXP Pro MCE 2005 SP2 I have an ATI TV Tuner card PCI to compliment the ATI Graphics card PCI-Express,Iam just wondering will I have to upgrade to WinXP pro also or will WinXP home ver work with WinXP Pro .Anyone who claims WinXP MCE 2005 is not WinXP Pro ,sorry you are wrong ,in the systeminformation utiltiy it list my O/S as WinXP Pro ,many utilities off the internet detect my system as WinXP Pro .I've been told WinXP MCE is WinXP Pro with the Media Center intergrated into it !I just installed System Mechanis er7 ,which gets such low user ratings in reviews that after I ordered it I tried to cancel the order it was rated 3.8 out of ten user reviews CNET gave it a 8 out of 10 review . Now I dont know just how messed up these private users of system mechanic PC's are are ,however it fixed over 100 errors on my system ,cleaned and compacted my registry fixed a problem I was having with Cine Player not running DVD's,Iam completely happy with this product ,I bought the utilitry only version of the product ,I did one thing perhasps many of these other users did not ,turned off my Norton Intertnet Security Suite 2006 when installing the System Mechanic utility ! Plus I disabled it when ever I perform a repair ,if it reports an error. Its H.D. Defragment blows away Windows version ,and it even speeded up my internet surfing ! Sorry did not mean to make this into a comercial .Thanks Again Nick