Connect a laptop at home  >  Part II - Client/Server

Step 3 - Starting the network

Here in Step 3, we're going to set up the necessary network software components to allow our laptop to communicate with our home network.

To begin, open the Network Control panel by clicking on Start > Settings > Control Panel and double clicking on the Network control panel. As the image above shows, the control panel already will have a number of devices and other network components, including the PC Card we've just installed.

We now need to add the appropriate network protocols. Since we're going to be placing the laptop on a Windows NT domain and using a shared internet connection, we'll be using the TCP/IP protocol.

Click the Add button. In the next box, select Protocol and click the Add button. Next, the Select Network Protocol box will appear, as shown below. Select Microsoft from the list of manufacturers on the left and select the TCP/IP protocol on the right.

Click OK. If your machine requests that you reboot it, do so. If not, you can go directly to begin setting up your TCP/IP protocol. There are many different ways to do this and many different TCP/IP addresses to choose from. We won't go into the details since there are other How tos and FAQs on our site OR on our Links page to help you find out more.

For our set up, we will use the TCP/IP address and Subnet Mask shown below. In our network then, all machines have the IP address 10.0.1.x, with x being a different number. All of the machines have the same subnet mask.

Also, since we'll connect our laptop to a home network using Windows NT Server, we need to enable the DNS settings as shown below. These settings are configured to match the Server which is running the primary domain controller, or primary server, for the NTDMN domain. The Host is the name of the laptop. The TCP/IP address of the server is then inserted in the DNS search order. Click OK. Windows 98 will request that you restart the computer and you should do so at this point.

With the proper protocols installed, we can move on to Step 4 to complete our laptop connection to our home network.

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