5. Testing your home network
There's no way you'll get internet sharing if your home network isn't configured properly. A good way of testing the network is to try and "ping" each computer from another one. A "ping" in computer terms is a little piece of information sent over a network that basically says "hello? are you there?" If the target computer is there, it will respond saying "yep, here I am".
To ping a computer, open up an MS-DOS prompt (in Windows 95/98/ME) or a Command Prompt (in Windows 2000/XP) and simply type "ping (target computer's IP address)". For example, if you wanted to ping your server computer (192.168.0.1) from your first client computer (192.168.0.2), you would open up an MS-DOS prompt (or Command Prompt) on the client computer and type "ping 192.168.0.1". If everything's working, you should get something like this:
Click on "Shared As" and select the options you want. I have "C:\Phil Share" shared as "PHIL SHARE" with full access and no password.
Now put something in this folder. Now go to another computer and go into Network Neighborhood. You should see the names of all the computers in your network (if you don't, something is wrong - do all the computers have the same Workgroup? If they do, you should see them there. Try pressing F5 to refresh the view. If they still don't appear, and don't appear after 10 or so seconds and a new Refresh, then your network is not configured properly. Go over all the steps in section 4 and see if you've made a simple mistake somewhere). Now you should be able to double click on the computer with the shared directory, open that directory and copy the file.
Cool eh?! If this all worked, you're in business - it's time to set up your internet sharing. If it didn't work, you'll need to go over the steps above and make sure you did everything right - it's very easy to make a simple mistake, and such mistakes can easily prevent your network from functioning. See the FAQ for some specific problem-solving suggestions. Please don't try to install any internet connection sharing or firewall software until you can at least ping every computer from the others - keep it simple!
By the way you can easily share a printer using roughly the same technique - go into the Printer Control Panel on the computer connected to the printer, right-click on the printer name and choose "Sharing" and then click on "Shared As:" and then "OK". Then go into the Printer Control Panel on a client computer, double-click on "Add Printer", click "Next", choose "Network Printer", click "Browse" to find the printer etc - it's not very hard and it's beyond the scope this tutorial so I won't explain it all here.