I guess this should be in another forum, i'm not sure.. apologies for that. but i am confused and i need help. Here's the situation..

Two computers. One of them(admin) has an internet connection and I want the other one to share it. Simply, I want to connect them through LAN and access the Internet on both.
I have successfully installed a new LAN card in the (admin) system. But when I connect the pc's with lan cable, nothing happens!!! "Bridge connections" gives an error (if at all I'm supposed to do that), none of the LAN card lights switch on.. the Local Area Connections show "Cable unplugged" ...

I have tested the hardware and the cable, everything is fine. All the relevant settings are at default options... I dont know if there's anything special to be done?

I have tried the help and support files of XP. Everything seems to be in order.. and i have done this once before, it worked then(maybe it was a fluke)

What am i doing wrong?

Please help. Its urgent.. these systems are needed in a project that I am doing.. and the deadline is not so favourable!

I take it from what you have written that you are connecting the 2 PCs together by just plugging a cat5 LAN cable from one to the other. If so, the cable you need has to be a CROSSOVER cable and it sounds like it is just a normal LAN cable. You can only connect 2 PCs together with normal cables if there is a hub or router in between.

If you get a CROSSOVER cable you should be able to get the 2 PCs talking.

Please post results...

But I used the same cable before!! That time the systems did detect each other. atleast they didnt say "cable unplugged".. and as far as i can remember i activated the file sharing service too.... that was some six months back. its not long enough to make me forget what i did.. or is it!

i finally got the crossover cable and the pc's are connected. I used the network setup wizard on both the systems in hopes to share the internet connection. by the end of it, there was a shared documents folder in "network places".. so the file sharing service started.
But i wasnt able to use internet on either computer!! The browsers on both pc's didnt open web pages, But the minute i disconnected the cable, the browser worked regularly on the host computer!?