help getting windows to share internet

[unwashed potato!]

now i tried thias s few months back with a pc to pc prearing for this, but i never managed to get it working so gave up
im trying to get my nice shiny new laptop to share the internet connection that my pc recieves from a router.

bascially my house has like 6 pcs in sharing the internet from some linksys router, which goes to my pc through a plugged in network card, which i then want to share to my laptop from the onboard network card. Does that make sense?

I have set up my onboard network card to share it internet connection and the file and printer, even though its not the onboard that recieves the net from the router, its the plugged in. i would have thought that i need to share the net from the plugged in, but then how would i share it with another as it already has the router plugged into that?

though i doubt it matters 1 thing im lost with is that when igo to network connections, there is 3 connection, yet i have only 2 network cards, the onboard and plugged in one. what is the 1394 connection?

All the connection have the same properties for TCP/IP. e.g. the IP address. subnet mask, gateway, and the DNS server, they are all the same, but windows is telling me this is wrong?

Then once that is sorted what settings do i need to do on the laptop? i have a wireless router (is that right) which i was hoping to use but i can just have it wired. I have tried using the same settings but that just comes up with there is a ip address conflict on both machines.

Im using xp pro on laptop and media edition on pc

the reason i dont just plug in the wireless router thing from the beggining router is because the distance is too far.

 

[.walls]

A 1394 connection is an IEEE 1394 connection (firewire) - so you can ignore that.


Assuming that the laptop is already configured to connect to a lan - if not, then just run through Start--> Programs--> Accessories--> Communications--> Network Setup Wizard and select the tick boxes for "lan" all the way through, making sure that you turn on file and printer sharing at the end (or you won't be able to see any shares on the lappy!)

There are 2 ways that you can proceed:

You will have to check the ip address of your router. If it's 192.168.0.1 (the default for most home routers), you'll have to set up the shared connection manually as Windows will set the ip address of the connection you're sharing to the same as the router, causing a conflict.

1) set the ip address of the router to something other than 192.168.0.1 (you'll have to renew the ip addresses of all pcs on the network - "ipconfig /renew") and share the plug in card's connection. It's been a long time since I looked at this sort of thing, but I'm pretty sure you have to tell Windows which network connection to share it with...

2)set a static ip address on the plug-in card (different to anything else on the network, including the router or any printers you have on tcp/ip and in the correct subnet!!), point the default gateway for that card to the router and bridge the connections. (or instead of bridging the connections, point the default gateway of the second nic at the first)

You may have to poke a hole in any firewall software you have installed... but the Windows one should do it automagically when you run the network setup wizard.

All the connection have the same properties for TCP/IP. e.g. the IP address. subnet mask, gateway, and the DNS server, they are all the same, but windows is telling me this is wrong?

Don't use the same ip address on both machines. Pick a similar ip address i.e. the first 3 octets - 192.168.0.X, where X is between 1 and 254 and is not the same as anything else on the network (including the router!!). I would recommend a fairly high number for the last octet, as they tend not to get used on small networks.

Hope that's helpful