Network your home PC and MacPart II - Getting your Mac to "act" like a PC The Overview In this Part II of the PC to Mac "how to", we are going to look at how you can use software on your Mac to allow it to network essentially as if it were a PC. In Part II we won't cover the hardware installation since we covered that in Part I (see Part I, Step 1). Here in Part II, we'll use Step 1 to cover the basic steps necessary to install TCP/IP on your Mac. This is the main protocol we'll be using in this setup. We'll show you how to do that with MacTCP, the older TCP software on the Mac, as well as Open Transport, the new networking setup that includes TCP/IP. The former is often used with System 7.x and the latter with System 7.5.x and System 8.x. Keep in mind that most of the Mac networking software is automatically installed along with the system software. If you can't find any of the control panels and other dialogs you'll see in our example, you may need to get out your original system disks and make sure to install the networking software. In Step 2, we'll cover simple configuration of TCP/IP on the PC. For other information about setting up networking on the PC, please see our Ethernet How To. In Step 3, we'll cover installation of the special software on the Mac that will allow it to network essentially as a PC. For this, we'll be using Dave for Macintosh from Thursby Software Systems Inc. This is the only software we know of that provides this functionality on the Mac. Dave is installed on a Mac and then allows the Mac to "mount," or connect, with shared directories on Windows NT, Windows 98/95, Windows for Workgroups computers, as well as other Macintosh computers. Macs with Dave can also use shared Postscript printers on a PC network. In short, once Dave is fully installed, PC network computers will see shared Mac resources in Network Neighborhood and Mac computers will see shared PC network resources in the Chooser. This probably seems all a bit confusing, but will become clearer as we progress. In Step 4, we'll finalize the connections and show you how to share various resources across the network. Finally, we'll finish with some quick recommendations and closing thoughts in the Summary page. We won't include a full review of Dave, but will provide some insights on our experience during the installation of our PC to Mac network. One final thought in this overview. Before you begin your PC to Mac network, we recommend you also read Part I of the PC to Mac "how to" in which we cover using another software product, PC MACLAN from Miramar Systems. This software provides the functions to allow your PC to network essentially as a Mac. Now, let's begin with the basic software setup on the Mac, in Step 1. Read on. Resources If you don't already have a copy of Dave, you can read all about it at their web site, www.thursby.com , or you can go directly to the demo page and download a working copy to try and to use through this how to.
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