Re OT Search terms

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

You have all been extremely generous with your advice, and I am very
grateful and will read it over very carefully. Nothing can be DONE as
yet, however, as it turns out that the NIC (PC Card) that came with the
laptop is defective, and I cannot get to the dealer before the weekend.

I am embarrassed, though, that I cannot seem to describe the situation
accurately. Perhaps I should not have used the term 'network,' because
what we have at the office is NOT a network as you are describing one.
But I don't know what else to call it. There is no router, and no
sysadmin. There's a "tech guy" who set up three of the five PCs
originally, and comes in when things get too scrambled from me to undo.
He flatly refuses to partition drives (which leaves me wondering if he
knows how to run FDISK!). The five PC are connected to a hub with Cat 5
cable. One of them (called "the server" but it isn't really) has the
LaserJet hooked up to its parallel port, and so has to be on for any PC
to print to the LJ. In addition, it has to be turned on before any other
PC if any of the others are to be able to see each other when clicking on
Network Neighborhood. Basically, the "network" is just used as an
improvement on sneakernet: Jane works on WordPerfect on Jane's PC, saves
the file there, then prints it out (we use a WP template file that embeds
the fully qualified path and file name in the header, so that one looking
at the printout knows where to find the file; before that it was a
continual round of "Where'd you save this? What's it called?"). The
editor pulls it off C:\My Documents on Jane's PC, edits it, and saves it,
sometimes on her C: drive, sometimes back on Jane's. Only for PageMaker
files (ads and other large items) is there any attempt at file serving:
all PM files are to be saved on the "server" (in any of half a dozen
folders). And the only reason that happened is that the non-server was
acting up so badly that the editor was terrified something would get
trashed.

Two of the five PCs have modems and could acess the Net independently,
but there's no need to. (One of the modem-equpped PCs is basically
dedicated to the accounting package.)

The plethora of protocols (we even have something called NetBios support
for--well it's the protocol that isn't TCP/IP or NetBEUI; I don't have it
loaded here, but it's got Xs and Ss in its name) seems to have just
grown. I strongly suspect that some of them were put there, will-we,
nill-we, when they insisted on "upgrading" to AOL 7 despite my dire
warnings of its being nothing more than a virus. There's even a phantom
"VPN adapter" that is not a hardware component.

That's at the office. Across the street and up the block is my home
office, with my one desktop. And it occurs to me that Robert's idea of
Laplink might be the best and simplest solution there. I have a highspeed
Laplink-type parallel cable that I used once before for a Direct Cable
Connection between my old laptop and old desktop. I could set that up
again and use it for file transfers between laptop and desktop or for
printing to the USB printer. (The laptop is too old to have USB, or I
could use a crossover USB cable. That also rules out the thumb
drive--over which I've been drooling for a year now, and I will get one
eventually.)

Again, many thanks

Patricia.