Laptop Part 2

Connect a laptop at home

Part II - Client/Server - Introduction

In Part II of this laptop-at-home "how to", we'll review the steps necessary to connect your laptop to a home network in absolutely ANY configuration you want including client/server, shared internet access and more. If you only want more basic file and printer sharing across a peer-to-peer network, check out Part I of this laptop "how to."

The key to this set up actually has nothing to do with home networking. Instead, it involves setting up your laptop in a dual-boot configuration. What that means is that you can start up (boot) your machine in one of two (dual) completely different configurations. The two configurations are so completely different that you should really think of this as having two computers in one. When you start up the laptop under one configuration the computer literally has NO knowledge of the other configuration. For example, you can have one configuration start up as Windows 98 and the other configuration start up as Windows NT. This also means that you install ALL of the applications you want to use on the Windows 95 machine AND the Windows NT machine. If you want to use the same applications, you'll need to install them twice. That's the downside. The upside is that ANY changes, software additions or problems that occur in one configuration won't have ANY impact on the other configuration. This is ideal for a work-based laptop being used at home.

NOW, before we get anyone in trouble with their company tech support folks, please keep in mind that the procedure we're going to detail is a fairly major one. Some tech support teams may gladly help you with this configuration, realizing that they will no longer need to fix any problems caused by home network set ups. Other tech support teams may not want you to do this and not support it if you do. Whether to ask first, or beg forgiveness later, is your choice.

To accomplish this, we'll go through each of the steps as follows:

In Step 1, we're going to review Partition Magic, the software that we suggest you use to set up your dual-boot configuration. There are other packages out there, but we think this is one of the best and have used it extensively in various setups.

In Step 2, we'll install a network card in the laptop using Windows 98 as the operating system. We'll be using an SMC EZ CardBus 10/100.

In Step 3, we'll take the necessary steps in the network control panel to add our laptop to our home network, in our case a Windows NT server domain setup. This is probably more than some users have or need, but the steps are similar if you just want to share an internet connection using TCP/IP.

In Step 4, we'll complete the "how to" with a few final steps for sharing printers and files. For more information on this section, we suggest you review our basic Ethernet "how to" as well as Part I of this laptop how to.

Before we get started and as we did in Part I, make sure you have the following list of computer and network equipment (or similar):

A desktop computer (or computers) that are part of your home network
An operating network or at least a network adapter card in the desktop
Necessary cabling. We prefer twisted pair but you can also use thin Ethernet cable (thinnet for short; also called coax). If you use twisted pair, you'll also need a hub or a special crossover cable if you'll only be connecting two computers - your desktop and the laptop. We prefer a hub for future expansion and we'll use one in this how to.
A network card for your laptop (more on this in Step 1 of Part I).
Windows 95 or 98 on both your desktop and laptop. Of course, you can use other operating systems, but these two from Microsoft have all the network software you'll need (except possibly a network card driver that comes with the card). We'll use Windows 98 here in Part II.

So, let's get started with Step 1.

[ Up ] [ Step 1 ] [ Step 2 ] [ Step 3 ] [ Step 4 ]

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This page last updated 07/22/2001