Different win OSs

My wife just bought a Japanese PC (she is japanese). It came with WinXP on it. The problem is that we have a number of computers in the house, each with a different operating system on it. My seven year old uses the english version of ME & I use 98.

I have a strange premonition that all three of us will be fighting for time on the one dialup account. I like to avoid loud noises, being the one male in a house with three females.

What are my options here?

 

1. Broadband and network the 3 PCs.
2. Disable the other two and tell em you haven't a clue why they can't connect.

 

1. Is a problem because I live on a military base in Japan that only has dialup service.

2. She is a martial arts expert.

 

I now fully understand.

If you have your PCs networked and use one as the host/modem controller all three of the PCs should be able to share the modem connection and work on the internet at the same time. Some speed issues if all three are doing downloads or lots of surfing at the same time but it certainly will work.

And with a little bit of setup tweaking, the three operating systems will network together just fine.

Your best bet at this point in time is probably a $50 router/switch combo and only use the switch ports to network your PCs. The router options are mostly aimed at cable or DSL unless you get into some really high cost devices I think. Or there may be reasonable ones with the router made to connect to a dial-up modem - just haven't looked for any.

With the switch you can network your PCs together. Then set one to act as ICS host and connect it to the modem. Set the others as clients to use the host's modem. Then as long as the host PC is running, any or all of you can connect.

 

an option that follows the router idea:


1.put a NIC all 3 machines (10/100 ehthernet cards).

2. connect them both to a router

3. connect the XP machine to the WAN port (this is the port that the internet connection is comming from).

4. connect the other 2 machines (98 and ME...i'd get rid of ME by the way...it's a joke of an OS) to any 2 ports on the router...1 and 2 for example.

5. use ICS on the XP machine to share the connnection with the connected router (XP will see the router as if it were another computer).

6. set up the router to assign IP addresses to the 98/me machines and set it up to optain its IP via DHCP.


basically you will have the XP sharing its connection with a router, and the router sharing its connection between the 2 other machines.

edit: ICS = Internet Connection Sharing, i've never set this up before, but it should work...you will get slowass connection speeds though using dialup.