Network your home PC and Mac > Part I - Getting your PC to "act" like a MacStep 3 - Installing the PC software If you've purchased the retail version of PC MACLAN then you already have excellent instructions for setting up the software. If you've downloaded the demo, the necessary instructions are there, but you'll probably find this section of the how-to quite helpful. And, if somehow you have MACLAN without any instructions or just wonder how the set up works, this section will be very helpful. To begin with, make sure you have all of your network hardware -- including PC adapter card, cables and hub -- installed correctly. For more on that, see our simple Ethernet How To. Please note that there are versions of PC MACLAN for Windows 3.1, Windows 95/98 and Windows NT. We'll be using the Windows 95 version for our how-to example. If you can, you'll want to ensure that all of this is working before you start. That can easily be accomplished if you already have another PC up and running on the network. If not, at least try using the diagnostic utility that came with your adapter card to make sure it is passing all of those tests. And, finally, make sure to check in Windows 95 that everything is working properly. To do that, right click on My Computer and select Properties. Click on the Device Manager tab and in the list of devices, click on Network Adapters. Make sure you don't have the dreaded yellow exclamation point or a red x next to the name of your adapter card. If everything checks OK, you're ready to begin. Insert the PC MACLAN installation CD-ROM and it should auto start. If not, click on Start>Run and browse to the CD-ROM file setup.exe and click Run. After a few startup screens, you'll be presented with the following dialog box. There appear to be few times when anyone will need to select Custom Installation (for example, installing onto a PC with a LocalTalk card installed). So leave the default Standard Installation selected and click the continue button.
Follow the on-screen prompts. When the installation is finished, you'll be asked if you want to view the installation log. That's unnecessary, so click no. You'll be presented with a dialog box explaining that the AppleTalk protocol and client must be installed via the Network Control Panel. This seems a bit odd to us since it seems like instructions for something you'll have to do manually. Instead, the next dialog box tells you this will all be handled automatically. We have to wonder why even bother with this step to inform you about the change. Anyway, it's not a big deal since MACLAN handled it very smoothly. Finally, you're presented with the instruction to restart the machine. Select Yes. Be forewarned. When the machine restarts, the AppleTalk messenger service is installed to auto start via the registry. Thus, if your PC is not connected at start up to a Mac running after the steps we detailed in Step 2, you will get a nasty looking "PC MACLAN Warning" dialog box that says "No packets have been received by the network adapter to which AppleTalk is bound." It sounds serious, but appears to not be. We found that this warning often appeared even when the network seemed to be working just fine. You can select the option "Don't Display this Warning in the Future" (and we recommend you do). Now, simply click the continue button and log on to your PC as you normally would, including the Windows password screen. A PC MACLAN "splash screen" (that has the name of the program and other details) will appear for a few seconds (there's an option to turn the splash screen off in the properties of the AppleTalk protocol under the Network control panel) and then the Program Group with all of the MACLAN added icons will open automatically as shown here.
To logon to the AppleTalk file server (the Mac in our example) as a client, you need to complete two more steps. First, as we mention above, ensure that the Mac is turned on and that all cables are properly installed. And, second, you need to logon to the server using Windows 95/98 Network Neighborhood. To do that, double click on the Network Neighborhood icon on the desktop. All computers on the network should display (although as many of us know, they don't always). If you Mac network had Zones, the first thing to appear would be icons for each Zone. In the Mac setup we just went through, Zones are not included so you should see icons for the Mac, in our case the LC475. We found we sometimes had to click on the "Entire Network" icon first, but we were then presented with the icon as shown here:
Double click on the icon for the Mac and you'll be presented with the dialog box to logon to the AppleTalk server. Since we shouldn't be concerned with network security, simply select the box to allow Guest access. (Recall that in Step 2 we turned on the feature to allow Guest access on the Mac client side).
Click OK and the open window should then change to the folder we shared back in Step 2 on the Mac. That's all there is to it. You have a running, working PC to Mac network. Keep in mind that PC MACLAN also has a number of key features that we are not covering in detail here. Primary among those are the ability to share over the network other resources, including printers. In addition, MACLAN provides the key ability to have your PC act as a Mac file server (in our how-to example we used a Mac as the server), thus allowing other Macs to connect to your PC. For more information, you should go directly to their home page at www.miramarsys.com. That's it. For a few closing thoughts, read on to the Summary.
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