I have 2 pc's i want to connect through a LAN. One runs win2K the other win98SE. The Win2k pc has 2 networkcards fitted, one for my cable modem, the other for the network. All are 10Mbs cards with UTP cable. The cards appear to work fine ( according to the hardware manager) as does the one in the win98 pc. However, the two computers refuse to talk to each other. Win2k keeps telling me the cable is not connected, but it is and i have confirmed it a good cable and if i chack the status of the connection it says i am connected but 0 packets sent or received. What am i doing wrong? I have installed the protocols too, ie IPX, TCP/IP. Any help will be most appreciated.

You guys kill me--but I'll be nice today. Whey you connect the two computers, from one network card to the other, you must use a cross over cable. Check your cable--do the strands match when you look at each of the connectors, side-by-side? If they match, you have a straight through cable. If you plan on adding more computers to your network, go buy a 10Mps hub--costs about $45. Of course you will also need another cable. Otherwise, go buy a crossover cable.

Ok, well I have the cheap hub, both nick cards work fine, actually they are connected to a 4 port cayman router/DSL modem...i disabled the dhcp server in the cayman, getting no ip's have all the protocols and everything, but still nothing...is there a prob with win 2k talking with win 98se?? If you have any suggestions please email me...this is driving me nuts..

You are not the only one. I have the same problem ! Windows 2000 doesn't want to talk to either my NT4 or windows 95 machines, yet they talk fine to each other !!! Somebody have an idea !! Adrian

The first thing you need to do is try to ping each machine. I suspect that you are trying to browse your network through Network Neighborhood and are having a problem resolving NetBIOS names. Win2k does not resolve NetBIOS the same way NT4.0 and Win9x did. You can go into TCP/IP advanced properties in Win2k and select that this computer is on a NT4.0 or Win9x network. This will enable NetBIOS over TCP/IP (port 139)which is disabled by default. Other solutions would be to create an LMHOSTS file on each computer and do a #PRE entry for each name or if you are on a NT4.0 network you can install WINS.

One more thing, make sure you have file and printer sharring enabled on the 98 machines.

have you included NetBeui on both machines?