by The following was posted yesterday in response to a
question with subject "Direct Cable Connection" in
the "Help_and_support" newsgroup which, as of today,
seems to have disappeared. The information may be of
some use, so I will re-post it here.
You can <drag and drop files between W95 and XP>,
assuming that Win 95 supports sharable files more or less
as Win 98 does. If you got the F<ile> & S<ettings>
T<ransfer> Lizard to crawl you obviously have a usable
link going. But it's a beast & the similar item from IBM
is worse.
Define the folders and/or printers you wish to access as
sharable on the "passive" ("host" - see below) machine
(right click & punch up Properties).
Get your link going with "Direct Cable Connection" (for
serial, parallel or IR links) (in W98, at least). Do the
same with the "connect to" stuff on XP. One, obviously,
has been defined as host/server/listener, the other as
guest/client/connecter. It doesn't really matter which
is which for file/printer sharing but I recommend the
older machine "listening" (being the "host") for several
reasons I don't remember at the moment.
Punch up "Network Neighborhood" on the client machine.
Drag and drop (either way).
Simple! Only took me 8 days (some lasting until the sun
rose) to figure that out, get it going and then copy
everything I wanted over. As to speed - if you're
talking gigabytes, it's not.
I use a null modem (serial) connection running at 57.6k.
Running at 115.2k I got too many I/O errors. Note a
little amu*t in W98 - when you change "modem"
characteristics (under the device manager)(speed, 8n1,
RTS/CTS) you MUST re-boot before they take effect,
although W98 gives you not a clue of this.
Never could get an IR link going and don't know how
parallel might compare - didn't want to fiddle with
connecting and disconnecting printers 'cause I intend to
use this as an ongoing "image refresh" mechanism.