Wireless or wired networking of 2 laptops

[setishock]

I should know the answer to this one but being new to W7, I thought I'd ask.
Lappy 1 is running vista home premium
Lappy 2 is running W7 home premium

What I'd like to do for now is connect the two together over the wireless G they both have and share the internet on the w7 rig with the vista rig. I get my internet connection over a Clear 4G WiMax usb device. Also I'd like to share the external HD on the w7 rig with the vista rig.

Reason behind all this is I design skins for my website and having both of them able to see the website would give me 2 differet sized screens running 2 different resolutions. Along with the fact that all of my templates and graphics goodies are on the external drive.

 

[Churla27]

One thing you could try for sharing the HD is to enable "Homegroup sharing" on your computers through network/internet.

 

[strollin]

Homegroup is only a Windows 7 thing, a Vista machine can't connect to a Homegroup.

There are a couple of ways you can share the USB cellular internet connection. First, you can buy a router that will accept your usb cellular device and then you can connect both machines to the router wirelessly. The Cradlepoint CTR35 Portable Router is such a router but you would need to check to make sure your usb device is compatible with it.

A cheaper way to share the internet connection between those 2 computers would be to install the Connectify software on the Win 7 machine which will let your Win 7 machine act as a wifi hotspot and allow sharing of it's internet connection with other computers via wifi.

Once you have a network established by either method above, you should then be able to share your external HDD over the network.

 

[setishock]

ARG!!!
I'm just gonna get a hardwire router and be done with it.

 

[strollin]

ARG!!!
I'm just gonna get a hardwire router and be done with it.

I don't understand, why the "ARG!!!"?

With a hardwired router you can use ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) which means you will need to have laptop 1 on and connected to the internet in order for laptop 2 to have internet access. No real advantage here over the Connectify software I mentioned above but requires the use of a router and cabling.

 

[setishock]

Yeah you're right. I had the ad hoc working but when I log off the connection from the slave laptop win7 dumps the ad hoc connection info. You have to start over and win7 ad hoc is a pain. I just want to have the security of a closed system (hardwire).

 

[threadmark]

Mac bridge with adhoc if compatible.