wireless connection between pc & mac (1 Viewer)

hi all -

my friend just got a pretty rockin' dell desktoop. his brother has an apple ibook and his mom has a really old apple performa (?) desktop.

so his goal is to get high-speed, a wireless broadband router (probably the linksys), and allow his brother and mom to share the connection.

i've connected plenty of pc's together wirelessly (i have four in my own home) ... but i'm not sure what's involved in hooking up mac's ... especially when the source is a pc. does it even matter?

i assume for the ibook, i just get one of those cards you slide into the notebook, but for the performa (since it's so old) i really have no clue.

so, if anyone has any info or links i could check out, it would be most appreciated.

thx!

ted

All computers now should use tcp/ip for communication, so you'll be fine networking a Mac with a PC. The only thing that may be difficult is file sharing. But then again file sharing tends to be problematic on PCs as is. If your looking to share files look into setting up an ftp server on one.

thx all ... i don't necessarily want to file-share between the pc's.

i'm really looking more for the two apple pc's to wirelessly share the high-speed dsl connection from the main pc computer.

is file-sharing an automatic part of that?

Getting the Performa hooked up might be a bit tough. You might want to start over at the Performa section of lowendmac.com.

The iBook shouldn't be a problem. Get an Airport card and you should be good to go.

-Keith

But the source is not a PC, it's the wireless router, right?

There's a good chance the iBook already has Airport; it's been built-in or been an option for a while.

Keith's suggestion for lowendmac.com is good. But if time is money, it might be less hassle just to buy a new Mac mini

It's all wifi, if the devices can "speak" wifi then they can access the wireless router and thus the internet. The Mac doesn't use differing standards there.

The challenge then is to get wifi into all the devices and set those up properly.

thx guys ... so as long as it's wifi, then it's compatible.

for the pc: a wireless router (prolly the linksys one)
for the macs: the Airport (i still have to check on how these work)

thx!

The Macs can use a generic wireless router, although the setup experience may not be as automagic. When talking about Airport, there are two ends: the base station, and the hardware in the Mac, just like any other computer.