Linardni said:
How to check whether my motherboard has inbuilt LAN card or not? Is external modem necessary or a single internal modem will suffice to make the PCs capable of being LANed.
Is LANcard required?
One simple way to check if your motherboard has a LAN card is by looking at the back panel of your PC case. If you see a jack similar, although a li'l bigger, to your phone then it does otherwise it doesn't. One sure shot way to check this would be to open up your PC case and finding the card. One other way would be to check in the system properties: if you are using Windows, press the windows logo key and the Pause key simultaneously, this would open the system properties window. Then you gotta browse to device manager. In windows xp you can do so by clicking on Hardware tab in the System properties window and then clicking on the device manager tab. In windows 98, you would directly see a device manager tab on the system properties window.
On the device manager window, click on network adapters, if you see something like Intel(R) Pro/100 VE Network Connection then you computer does have a properly installed network/LAN card.
Now to answer your second question, you don't need a modem to connect/setup a LAN. A modem just connects your computer to the internet using your phone line. And no, it doesn't matter whether you have an internal or external modem, they all do the same barring one difference which is of no use to you. I'd recommend you to buy an internal modem if your computer doesn't already have one.
About your third question, yes, you need a LAN card/NIC (network interface card) to setup a LAN i.e. ethernet.
You'll need to install one LAN card in each of your PC and then buy a switch to interconnect the computers. On a side note, if you just wanna connect 2 computers, you don't need a switch. You can directly connect 2 computers using a crossover cable. After you get your LAN working, connecting to the internet would depend on what kind of internet connection you have. If you decide to go with a dial-up connection then you can make one computer the server and other computers on the LAN can access the internet using that server's connection. You would need a proxy server software for this task, WinProxy is a good one.
For any other help in setting up a home network, visit these links:
*www.homenethelp.com/web/howto/HomeNet-start.asp
*www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/default.mspx
*compnetworking.about.com/od/homenetworking/l/blhomeadvisor.htm
