[Jim]

As in the title. I have a USB HD but this method is fairly slow and requires messing about with cables etc, I also have a 2gig USB pen drive but this can be too small at times. Is networking fast and easy? bearing in mind I have never networked 2 computers together before. Or is it worth buying a bigger pen drive seeing as the 8gig decent brands are about £40

[GCW]

I too will be interested in this as my laptop is dying and the mouse no longer works, but I want to get some info transferred.

[Obi-Wan is lost...]

Networking is very easy. Windoze does most of it for you, easiest is to use a hub (some wireless routers have ports on the back aswell so you can use them as hubs), if not you need a crossover cable if you are doing it directly pc-to-pc(wired differently), you can use the network setup wizard to create a mini-network, then share the c: drive on the machine you want to copy from and you should be able to see it under 'entire' network from the new machine. If not check you have firewalls turned off etc.

Think it is different/harder if you have XPhome. Only done this on XPpro.

Speed wise, depends on various things. USB1.1=12mbps max, USB2=480mpbs max (but you have to copy it twice), TCP/IP on your network card is likely to be 10/100, so 100mbps, (or if you've got a Mac 10/100/1000 as standard) 

[slackline]

Is networking fast and easy?

The speed of the network will depend on, well the speed of the network    For example the maximum theoretical speed for your network card may be 10Mbps and this would limit things if the network card on your other computer is capable of 100Mbps.

Setting it up is dependent on the hardware you have.  Do you have a router in place already providing a network and wireless at home?

There is info within here on how to get two windows computers talking to each other.

It might take a while to do the transfer using the external HD, but I'd recommend it as you then have the external HD as a backup for all your data, so if the desktop dies and your laptop dies/stolen/has a drink spilt over it or whatever then you still have your data backed up and won't have lost anything (nor will you have to pay ~£500 to get it all back like JB  )

[Jim]

I'm just using it for transfering movies, music, tv programs etc between laptop and PC so can be small or large.
I've tried setting network up between 2 computers before using a crossover cable but couldn't seem to get the file sharing thing to work, I did get them to share interweb connection tho. I'll give it another go. At least I won't have to be copying stuff twice.

Another thing, USB2 - why does my PC and laptop, which both have USB2, only have a couple of the ports as USB2 and the rest are USB1.1. They don't exactly go out of there way to distinguish them either. seems very strange to me

[dontfollowme]

What about a portable hard drive with firewire? If only the PC has it will speed things half of the transfer up...

[Control freak]

Get your self a cross over cable. Youll get a much higher throughput than going through a switch or a hub - if you check the utilisation tab on task manager it should hit in excess of 80%.

Just link the two together and give each a static IP address on the same subnet ie 10.1.1.1 and 10.1.1.2, and youre good to go