2 PC's crossover ethernet cable problem

I have 2 PC's close together on a table.

They are hard connected via a cross wired ethernet cable.

Until recently, I always saw both PC's and I was able to transfer files and share a printer.

Now I can only see my PC on the Network.

I tried self diagnosis and it indicates "no valid IP address".

Can you help?

How are the PCs getting their ip address? Do you have a router doing it dynamically or you have manually set the ip's? Try setting ip manually.

Bill2 said:

How are the PCs getting their ip address? Do you have a router doing it dynamically or you have manually set the ip's? Try setting ip manually.

Why is the router involved in the hard wired connection?

How do I set up the LAN ip address manually?

BTW Both PC's connect to the internet via a router OK.

Router can be wired or wireless. If you know the router's IP (internal ip, not the external one), click on Network and Sharing center in the Control Panel, then in the left pane click on Change adapter settings, double click the wired connection icon, then click ipv4 in the list. Check "use the following ip address" and fill in the details.

The ip address must be in the router's range so if the router is 192.168.1.1 then the ip needs to be set to 192.168.1.x where x can be 2-254. The subnet mask will be entered automatically and the default gateway will be the router's ip. The primary dns can also be the router's ip, the secondary can be left blank. Save the settings. You should also disable DHCP on the router to stop it from assigning ip's dynamically.

If you dont know the router's ip, go to command prompt and type ipconfig /all. Check the ip under Ethernet adapter LAN entry.

If they are both connected to a Router, why do you also have them linked with a crossover cable? You don't need both connections to share files etc.

alphanumeric said:

If they are both connected to a Router, why do you also have them linked with a crossover cable? You don't need both connections to share files etc.

We are using a local WIFI ISP with a MAC addressed router.

Prior to the crossover cable, we needed the 'open' router for the PC's to link.

We felt that a crossover would be a more robust connection.

(Sometimes, we would be on different routers)

OK, so you don't have your own router in house. So how did you setup the cross over cable in the first place? I don't believe thats plug and play, as Bill2 said you usually have to set each PC's NIC up with static IP's etc.

alphanumeric said:

OK, so you don't have your own router in house. So how did you setup the cross over cable in the first place? I don't believe thats plug and play, as Bill2 said you usually have to set each PC's NIC up with static IP's etc.

Thanks guys for your help.

First, and I do not know why, the LAN is now working fine.

I have a Linksys G house router LAN wired to another router in my attic that is LAN hard wired to an external antenna repeater aimed at a tower about 1/2 mile away.

For about $175 a year, our homeowner community may choose the tower (Epic Communications) as our ISP.

I have 2 ways to connect the 2 PC's:

If both PC's are using the Linksys router, they can see each other.
The crossover cable is method #2.


Why keep the Linksys? It's location is closer to my PC's and it has a stronger signal.

I have no idea how to set the LAN address.

Somehow the Win7 brains figured it out.

Even though it is working, I still feel ignorant.

I'm not a networking expert by any means but I'm thinking if you didn't do any custom setup for the network cards connected to the cross over cable, it isn't doing anything and you may as well remove it. If you want to confirm if it works or not disable your wireless cards in each PC and see if you can still share files etc. I don't think you will be able too. I'll understand if you don't want to mes with it though, now that its working.