Take Mr. Bill, for example. Bill, who videotapes weddings for a living, uses two HP desktops for his home-based business. He wanted to link the two PCs so he could store carbon copies of data on both hard drives.

"I didn't look very hard at a network because I didn't know much about it, and I knew it meant adding more Hardware to my machine," says Bill. He found an alternative in Direct Cable Connect, an applet included in Windows 95,  98 and ME. DCC lets a PC access another system's disk drive over a serial or parallel cable, creating a dirt-cheap (albeit slow) mini-network.

Next, connect the PCs. Although serial cables are cheaper, a fast parallel cable works much better for installing software or moving large files over the wire. Just make sure you use a bi-directional parallel cable--older ones may not work.

 Configuration

.Once set up, DCC is simple to use, but configuring it requires several steps. In many cases, you'll need to install DCC from the Windows 95 or 98-setup disc. Put the Windows CD-ROM into the CD-ROM drive, and click Start, Settings, and Control Panel. Double-click the Add/Remove Programs icon, and click the Windows Setup tab in the dialog box. In the scrolling list, click the Communications item and then click the Details button. Click the check box next to Direct Cable Connect to select this option. Click OK to start the installation. Repeat this procedure for each PC you wish to connect.

To make data available to other PCs, you must tell Windows to share drives with other machines. The PC whose drives you want to share is the host; the one accessing them is the guest. On the host PC, right-click the Network Neighborhood icon on the Desktop and select Properties. On the Configuration sheet, click File and Print Sharing; then, in the resulting dialog box, check "I want to be able to give others access to my files."

Now tell the host system which drives you want to make available to the guest. On the host PC, right-click each drive icon in Explorer or My Computer and click the Sharing menu item. In the Sharing sheet of the drive's Properties dialog box, click the Shared As button and enter a name for the drive in the Share Name box. Repeat this set of steps for every drive you want the guest system to access.

Finally launch DCC on both PCs (from the Start menu click Programs, Accessories, Communications folder), and identify the host and guest machines. Once the connection is made launch Windows Explorer on the guest PC and choose Tools, Map Network Drive. Use the drop-down Path list to select a drive on the host machine. Repeat the process to map other drives. From then on, just connect the PCs and launch DCC. The host's shared drives will appear as local drives on the guest PC, and they can be used with Windows Explorer and other file-management tools

DCC won't win any Medals for speed: A 3 MB file can take about 60 seconds to copy over a parallel cable, while a serial transfer may take nearly three times as long. "I'll click and drag to have the program start transferring, and I'll go and do something else," says Bill, who moves about 160MB of data across a parallel cable once a week. "The time is not that big a concern to me."

Mr. Bill’s work-around isn't for everyone. The more often you need PC-to-PC connectivity, the more you'll benefit from the speed of a real network. If your systems have free slots, you can set up a two-PC Ethernet LAN for less than $100, though configuring it can be tricky. And unlike a full-fledged LAN, Direct Cable Connection doesn't provide a practical way to share a printer between two PCs. (Mr. Bill manages the task of sharing one Digital Photo Printer between his two systems by using a cable-switch box setup.)

Still, Bill likes his setup. "It's very functional and easy to use. You don't have to crawl under the Desk to switch those darn cables around."

Bi-directional parallel cable:

Two DB-25 male connectors, and cable with at least eleven conductors. If you can't find the multi-conductor cable, get thin stranded hookup wire and spiral cable wrap (Radio Shack #278-1638). Connect pins as follows: