With Microsoft's "closed system" approach to computing you might think that networking an Acorn to a PC is a waste of time. It's certainly expensive from the Acorn's point of view - with a network adaptor card costing nearly ten times more than a comparable PC offering.
However, for me, the investment has been worthwhile. The primary advantage has been being able to surf for both Acorn and PC stuff during a single session - without having to worry how to transfer 2 or 3 Megabytes of information between machines at the end.
Other advantages have surfaced like being able to back up my Acorn's hard drive to a CDRW on the PC. Also I was recently playing with a fixed-frequency monitor on the PC and, whenever I lost the picture while adjusting the video timings, I was able to recover without rebooting because I could control the PC from the Acorn.
Here then is a complete step-by-step guide to setting up a basic network. At the moment it only covers getting the Acorn able to access files on the PC - but I will be extending it to cover the full capability of my current setup:
Acorn to PC
PC to Acorn
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The setup is broken down into two sections. You will need to work through the PC setup and one or other of the Acorn setups - depending upon whether you are using !OmniClient or !LanMan98.
My personal recommendation is !LanMan98 as this preserves the Windows naming conventions - and because it is so much easier to set up.
Where possible I have run things in order to minimise the amount of restarts required. It's very possible that I may now have one or two things out of step. If this is the case please let me know so I can change these pages.
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