Can not establish a network connection

I want to use my laptop (WinXP) to transfer Autocad drawings between my office network (WinXP) and my home PC (WinXP) , but I cannot get the lappy to connect to the home PC.

All I have to do at work is plug in the Cat5 cable and it's connected, but I cannot get a network set up at home. I've run the networking wizard on both computers, and made sure the workgroup name is the same, but they won't see each other. If I try to repair the connection, I get the following message

Repair Connection

The following steps of the repair operation failed:
Renewing the IP address.

Please contact the network administrator or ISP.

[DVNT1]

How are teh two computers connected? If by a single cable, it must be a crossover cable or it will not work. If by hub or switch, be sure the hub or switch supports the network card speeds which is normally 10baseT, 100-baseT, or both (aka 10/100).

After the above is confirmed, then there is teh question of IP addresses. At work you have a DHCP serevr to assign addresses. At home you may not unless you have a router or otherwise specially setup a DHCP server. You can assign teh IP address manually for when you are at home.

I've tried a crossover cable, but I've now got them both in a 4 port hub.

At work, all the computers are connected through the router. How do I make on of the computers act as the DHCP server? I also need a refresher on how to manually assign IP's

We'll start from Network Connections in the Control Panel.

Local Area Connection
Properties button
Double-click Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)
Check Use the following IP address:
Put in your IP address

[Scott Tiger]

All the cable modem routers I've seen have a built in DHCP server.

I'd run "IPCONFIG /all" from a command prompt on both machines and first just to gather information first. Then I'd start making the changes.

Getting a IP address is typically pretty easy with modern hardware. I have more trouble getting DNS to work though. Can you ping one machine from the other by IP? If so, then I'd try pinging by name.

The only time I've ever had to manually configure the IP of a machine is when the DHCP server was having trouble with scope.

[DVNT1]

A simple way to enable a DHCP server at home is to enable Windows' ICS. Note: If you have a router at home then this can cause problems, but in that case you should be able to use the router's DHCP server anyway.

[DVNT1]

btw, I think this DHCP server is free for non-commercial use... http://home.t-online.de/home/hanewin/dhcp-e.htm (I never tried it though)

Well, I don't want ICS, and I know Windows already has all the componets to establish a network connection between two computers, so I really don't want to install a separate DHPC server.

Here's the info from the laptop

Dhcp Enabled . . . . . . . . . . . . :Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . :Yes
Autoconfiguration IP Address . . :169.254.156.53
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . . . :255.255.0.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . . :

From the Desktop:

Dhcp Enabled . . . . . . . . . . . . :Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . :Yes
Autoconfiguration IP Address . . :169.254.18.162
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . . . :255.255.0.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . . :

I don't want to mess with the lappy, because I don't want to loose the ability to connect to the network at work, so what do I need to do to the Desktop to make it see the laptop?

You have 169.x.x.x IP's which means neither getting an IP from DHCP.

I'm sure the router at work takes care of assigning the IP when it's connected to the network at work, so what do I have to do to make these two see each other at home when they are connected through a crossover cable.