Network your home PC and Mac > Part II - Getting your Mac to "act" like a PCSummary It may seem as you've read through Part II of our PC and Mac How To, that this option is a bit more complicated. In fact, because of the need to make sure a working TCP/IP network is already installed, that is somewhat the case. But, after that step is complete, installing Dave was a breeze and led to easy sharing of files across the network. As we said with PC MACLAN, we think this is a great product. It, too, delivers on all the function it promises. It was easy to install and functioned without any major problems. We really can not say whether we prefer MACLAN or Dave. It does depend on your setup and which networking system you prefer to use on your PC to Mac network. Clearly, MACLAN has some advantages because it uses the AppleTalk protocols that were designed to be very easy to set up. For the most part, you install it and it works. Obviously, TCP/IP can be a bit trickier to get working as the basis for Dave. In fact, as we worked on our setup for this how to, a nasty TCP/IP problem confounded us for a while. In the end, we determined it was a bad network card on the PC, but because TCP/IP is so mysterious it took as a while to believe that everything was right in that setup and look elsewhere, like the hardware, for the problem. Still, for us and for many home networkers, we believe that PCs will dominate the household and the over riding need will be to network a lone Mac into the setup. In this case, Dave is probably the way to go, especially if the network already has TCP/IP installed for internet sharing or games. Stay tuned for another review of COPSTalk, a product that competes with MACLAN to set up networking on your PC essentially as if it were a Mac. We'll try to get to that within the next few weeks. In the meantime, you'll probably want to check out both MACLAN and Dave on their respective web sites and see which one, if either, is the right choice for your setup.
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