Internet connection sharing / LAN issue, HELP

[m1ks]

Hi,
Newbie here and i'm sure you've heard this one before so apologies and thanks in advance for any help. I'll try to be as thorough as possible.

Two PC's Desktop running XP Home with internal generic 10/100 NIC and AOL 9 silver BB 512k, (i can see you all cringeing), Laptop running XP Pro PCMCIA 10/100 NIC connected together via a Netgear 10 base T 4 port hub, (cos it was there and cheap).
Have gotten the PC's seeing each other, shared drives etc etc.
Cannot get ICS to work, AOL say can only work via a router and only on gold or platinum or bloody titanium or nickel alloy, etc, but not silver? In short v unhelpful, considering they told me i couldn't use the gold as the phone line isn't good enough, (previous long running problem).
OK so I believe there's a way of doing this and don't want to go to the expense of a router if i can avoid, have tried using AnalogX proxy but can't make sense of it, additionally can ping laptop from desktop but get request timed out vice versa, have verified IP addresses for both network connections, checked ICS, etc.
Help please.

P.S. If i have to go the Router route, what should i expect to pay for a 4 port, (will be adding another desktop PC in the near future)

Mike

 

[Xtra]

As long as you have internet connection on the main machine, you can share the internet connection and It doesn't matter if its cable, dsl or dial up. You say you have a local area network working properly. Do you have firewalls on both machines? If you are using firewall, you might need to configure your firewall software on both machines.

Router is a better idea for internet connection sharing. Most of the new routers has firewalls. You will be saving your system resources too. On ebay you may find them for really cheap.

 

[DelJo63]

ICS will take the common router address of 192.168.0.1 and it's more fuss
than it's worth. The 4 port router will be sufficient for your needs.
If necessary, you can a a cheap hub/switch to extend the number of ports to 7.

Just make sure all systems are configured for DHCP and your existing layout
should be fine.