Quick question about temporarily networking computers since we seem to have a lot of computer/network gurus here.....

I have a desktop at home I need to temp tranfer files somewhere else. I have my work laptop I want to transfer to. I have a crossover cable from previous connected desktops I use to have at home.

When I set the computers up for this connection, my desktop writes a setup file to disk that I have to run on the laptop to set the networking up.

My problem is, my laptop is set up now for my work network. I am wondering if setting up file transfer through a crossover cable is going to mess up any work network setup or not. Getting IT to fix anything if I mess it up would be quite difficult to do as well as, our new IT supervisor is pretty harsh about anything you do to the computers that they don't do themselves (installing programs, stuff like that.) I don't want to end up needing IT to fix any network issues if anything gets messed up.


What I am doing is transfering files over to hold so I can format and repartition a secondary drive I have for photography (approximately 30-40 gb worth of photos.) I can't hold everything on my main desktop drive. Using my two 2 gb SD cards isn't working well with very long write times. It's taking me about an hour to transfer 2 gb onto the SD cards. That's just taking way too long.

Any help or thoughts are appreciated. I'm not looking to purchase anything to do this, though eventually I'd like to grab myself a portable hard drive.

You can skip the nannying setup wizards and files and just set the network up manually. Assuming you can log on to the laptop locally (i.e. you can bypass any form of network domain log on), you can just make note of any settings you have to change, so that you can restore them after the procedure.

I would expect your work network to assign IP addresses by DHCP, whereas you will need a fixed manually entered IP for direct connection. If it is on static already, then you just need to change the IP on your home machine to be on the same subnet. Other than that, it should be possible to reconfigure your home PC to match the workgroup and create a writeable share you can copy the files from, and then recreate after the repartioning and write the files back, so you never need touch file sharing directly on the laptop.

Thought about burning the images onto a DVD or something, while you repartition and stuff?