Can't set up Network

My brother and i have almost identical machines (spec in my signature...he has AMD 3200XP+ and 1gb of RAM). Today we tried to set up a LAN by connecting both motherboards via their network socket using my cable. I've used this cable in the past with his machine to play a game while connected and it worked fine. I read elsewhere that the colour of the cables at the end should be in a different order to ensure it's a crossover cable. I've checked that and mine is.<p>
We can't seem to get either machine to see the other even though both machines say that they're connected and enabled. When he reboots my machine says cable unplugged so i know the machines are connected in some way....even if it's not properly.
What are we missing???
This is my first attempt at trying this so i may have missed something really obvious!!!
thanks

 

I'm guessing you missed several things but none of them real obvious.

To save my fingers from lots of typing of info that is already typed, take a look at http://www.practicallynetworked.com/

That site should offer you a great intro & how-to. If you try what they suggest and still have problems, feel free to post back here with specifics. Knowing your OS will help in that case though and if XP, which flavor.

 

thanks for the tips newt.

it turns out that we had turned off the XP firewall but forgot about ZoneAlarm!!!
Once that was switched off it was fine

thanks for replying
David