VINSTAR, you can check your cable against the picture of a crossover cable below. I drew this some years ago as a reference for my assistants.
There are eight wires of different colours in a network cable, four with solid colours and four white with coloured stripes. Each solid colour is twisted together with a striped wire of the same colour.
The connectors at the ends of the cable are called RJ-45 jacks. Each pin on the jack are assigned specific functions. (Only 4 pins are actually used in a simple network).
*img158.imageshack.us/img158/3290/crossoverlancable.gif
Check the position of the wires on each jack. You will see that the position of some wires are the same on both jacks, while some of them are interchanged. This is because the TRANSMIT pins of one computer have to be connected to the RECEIVE pins of the other computer. This is why it is called a crossover cable.
Specifically, the orange wire is interchanged with the green wire, and the orange-stripe is interchanged with the the green-stripe.
If the cable you have has the wires arranged like this, you can plug each jack into the compters and set up a network.
If the wire colours are the same on each jack, it's a straight-through cable and you have to use it with a network hub or switch. (Well, there are special cases where you can use a straight-through cable without a hub/switch, but let's not complicate things by going into that).