sharing two pc's to one monitor ?? please help...

thanks for help in advance.......
I have two computers, one has win xp and the other win me, i want to hook these two up, using only one monitor, but also to share a printer, scanner, speaker, mic, and if possible but not nessecary a keyboard and mouse. I have all usb plugs, except for the monitor of course. I bought a networking card and installed it into the win me pc, for the win xp already had one, and hooked the two pcs together withthe included lan cable. I have dial up networking. on the win xp pc it states the cable is unplugged, even though it is plugged in, do these not work together, the networking cards or does anyone else have an idea of what to do or use this isnt costly? I currently unhook the monitor and rehook it, but it is a pain.

 

You can share a monitor, keyboard and mouse via a KVM switch (and some offer audio options). The are avail at Newegg and the like. To share the printer and scaner you will needed to set up a network (as you are attempting). To connect to PC's you can use a cross-over cable vice a regular Cat5.

 

thanks so far......so if i get ex.> a belkin kvm switch, Ii can use that to switch between the two monitors and when I try to reset up my networking card, i can use all that stuff together and it will work? also is the lan cable that came with the networking card the same thing as a cross over cable?

 

The easiest way I have found is to use RealVNC. This can be loaded from the webat www.realvnc.com. You run a client on one machine and a server on the other then connect the client to the server across your network. The result aren't 100% because you're refreshing an entire screen across the network so don't expect to use it to play games. For the most part, however, it works well and there's a UNIX version available. You can run it without mouse or keyboard on the server machine provided the BIOS will allow you to boot without them.

Hope this helps

 

To clarify, a cross-over cable will generally state right on it, "crossover" and the standard color for this type of cable is yellow.
Here is a link to explain what a crossover is and how to check if it is a patch or crossover cable.
http://www.littlewhitedog.com/content-8.html
half way down, you will be able to see what each end should look like, and they must be different when viewed side by side.