Connecting two computers together over network: part 3, the hardware solution

To provide a summary of what has been covered through "connecting two computers" posts,
In part 1 I provided a basic idea of connecting two computers together mainly using softwares over a network. Two software programs I talked about are Maxivista and vnc programs. What we tried to achieve in part 1 was to connect two computers together and be able to control both computers by a single mouse/keyboard.

Part 2 covered, the next step in connecting two computers together, the ability to access respective hard drives again over the network. In this case using the Microsoft workgroup.

Today I am going to talk about hardware solutions; to access other computers harddrive using relevant hardware.

Option 1: USB data bridge cable

This is a special Ethernet crossover cable, not a regular USB A/B cable. In fact you should not connect two computers using a regular USB male/female cable, that would severely damage your harddrives. The bulb in the middle avoid that damage and provide necessary support for connecting two computers to access each other's data.

When you purchase this cable it will always comes with relevent software CD that fullfill the task.

Option 2: Ethernet cable. Usually in this case computer A will be connected to Internet and will have a dual Ethernet hook up PCI or two Ethernet cards, allowing Ethernet in and Ethernet out. Ethernet out, will go into Computer B. This will allow Computer B to access files from PC A and also access the internet. This is also called cross-over cable method. (Descriptive tutorial from Microsoft)

Other options are, network Router, Switch and Hub.

Apart from connecting two computers over the network there are other options to perform the similar task using computer hardware. In this blog post I talked about using USB data bridge cable, Ethernet cross-over cable, and Network hubs. I hope you enjoyed today's post about connecting two computers together. Join ashPresentom next time when we talk about remote access technology to computers from anywhere in the world.

If you have any feedbacks or would like to suggest additions to ashPresentom, please feel free to use the comments section. Until next time this is ashPresentom.