Ethernet vs. Crossover Cable

Hardware Hub Networking
1

A little bit of backstory. I download my steam games at my university onto my laptop because the download speeds are thousands of times faster and I don't have to worry about hitting my data cap. Now my laptop can't play the games so I am trying to transfer the files from my laptop to my desktop. I have an extremely slow wireless router and my desktop has two NICs, and both the laptop and the desktop have gigabit NICs.

I tried connecting my laptop to my desktop via a wired connection however I am not able to see the files or access them from my desktop to transfer them. I read on other forums people stating that you need a crossover cable, and on others that if you have gigabit NICs you can use a regular ethernet cable. Well I don't have a crossover nor the money to get one right now.

So how can I get my computers to talk to each other so I can transfer my games? Thanks to anyone who can help.

2

A dirty solution to make a crossover cable is to cut a regular cable in half & tie up the pairs to match this
http://www.archonmagnus.com/mods/crossOverCable/crossOverCableDiagram2.jpg

3

Wouldn't I need the tools to make a the cables tho?

4

Nope, the 'dirty' solution is to cut the cable in half & peel off the insulations with scissors lol

5

So I would cut it open and then splice the cables as illustrated in the diagram?

6

yup

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7

You have your configuration wrong. Modern NICs are aware of patch and crossover cables and switch accordingly.

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8

Assuming you're on Windows, try this. If you have a couple of Ethernet cables, it'll be faster.

Link: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/connect-two-computers-using-wireless-router-55041.html

9

Its maybe worth mentioning that you shouldn't need a crossover cable, all modern Ethernet NICs can detect and auto configure themselves for the right connection. Unless windows is doing something weird, which i dont think it does.

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10

You need to give both PCs a static IP address, as well as making sure they are on the same subnet. I just use a program called Nitroshare to avoid the hassle.

http://nitroshare.net/

11

Don't bother with a crossover cable just to move data take the hard drive out of the laptop and put it in the desktop and just transfer them that way.
That way the only bottleneck is the hard drives speed itself

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12

Splicing cables to do this is likely not a good idea. Most people only have Cat5 or Cat5e cables in their homes, so maximum speeds are going to top out at either 100Mb/s or 1Gb/s. Even at the top speed of 1Gb/s, it's still going to take much longer than simply removing the drive and copying the data off it onto a desktop PC. Cloning a drive at SATA3 speeds would still be 6x faster than Gigabit Ethernet.

The only other thing I think that you might be missing is setting up Shares. Without any Windows Shares configured, you're not going to see anything, regardless of the cable type used. Your best bet would be to set up the folder containing all the games as a share under "Properties" and set permissions so that everyone can access / read + write.

Just remember to remove the sharing settings once the transfer is complete, otherwise when you roam with the laptop, other people will be able to connect to it and copy those files / folders.

In short, make sure to check that the interfaces are enabled on both machines, use a crossover cable eliminate potential problems, configure windows shares correctly, and all should be good in the world.