Laptop Linking to Main computer questions

[Der Alta]

I'm in a bit over my head on this one, so I'm asking the GTPlanet Guru's to lend a hand.

Situation: Coworker has an old Zip disk. He wants to get the info off it. His computer at home has a zip drive, but he has no CD burner. His ultimate goal is to print what is on the Zip disk. Which is a number of large format drawings.

The office laptop has a CD Burner. Easy enough solution, link the Co-workers home computer to the Office laptop, transfer the info via NIC.

My only question is what's going to happen when He plugs a cable into his computer and the laptop? What steps will he have to go through to transfer the info. His home computer is a Win98, the Office laptop it WinXP.

If I didn't provide enough info, please ask me questions, and I can fill in what is needed.

Thanks in advance.

AO

 

[rjensen11]

I'd recommend the network solution where you dial into your computer from another location and control it remotely. As long as the passwords are good and you don't leave the long-distance network up all the time, there shouldn't be too much of a chance that somebody could hack in and stuff. Also, I don't think the computer has to be hooked up to its ISP, but I could be wrong. That's what I'd recommend first.

If you're talking about printing off large file sizes, that's tricky. My computer in my bedroom has WinME on it, and my dad's computer can see everything on it remotely from in his room. WinME is better for networking too. When I had 98 on the computer, it couldn't access our network. I could ping my router, but that was it. The only way I can guess how to take care of things is to make sure each of the computers has some network name and everything's taken care of, like the PC's name you've given it is filled in. The two don't have to have hte same network name, I don't think. When the two connect via CAT5 or whatnot, the best-case-scenario would be both computers would say "New Network Found" and everything would be accessable through Network Neighborhood. If that doesn't work, I don't know what you could do other than uploading the files onto an online storage place or try to have somebody find a USB Zip drive. I can't imagine they'd be TOO hard to find, somebody would have to have one, either at home or work. Then WinXP should see it and load the according drivers.

 

[Pako]

As rjensen11 stated, I would also approach it using the network solution.

Let me make a couple of assumptions. The Home computer and the Laptop both have a NIC card in them correct?

I would setup a peer to peer network. What you need is a piece of CAT5 wired as a Cross-over cable. This will allow him to hookup Computer "A" directly to computer "B". Right click on each computer's "My Computer" and goto properties. Set each computer's "Workgroup" to the same thing, i.e. "Home". This workgroup setting will allow the computers to communicate in the peer to peer network. XP has a really good wizard to accomplish this.

There's a lot of variables that can come into play, but lets hope you can get that far.

If you can actually get each computer on the same workgroup, and have them connected by a cross-over cable, next would be to "Share" the zip drive. On the home computer, goto networking properties, and make sure that "Microsoft Networks" has checks in "Sharing Files". Once you have confirmed that, right click on the zip drive and goto sharing. Enable sharing on that drive and give it a share name.

At that point, if the pier to pier network is working, you should be able to browse the network on the laptop and see the zip disk that you shared our on the home computer.

Now you can explore the contents of the shared zip drive from the laptop and copy the files to the laptop.

From there you can do what ever you need to do.

Hope this helps....

You can search the web for additional resources on setting up a Peer to Peer network if you run into any problems..

Hope this helps..

 

[Der Alta]

Thanks Guys! Knowing my co-worker, these are too difficult for him to handle. I had to walk him step by step through printing Landscape instead of Portrait And I'm not the most knowledgeable when it comes to this stuff.

It looks like I'll find him a storage space to load it too, so I can print it here.

Thanks for the input Guys!

AO