[wlug] dead horse flogging

I tried to get my Asus laptop (Vista) to talk to my Acer (Linux Ubuntu 8.04) but no joy. I can ping 192.168.0.1, which is the Asus's network address, but cant see a network connection in the places>network folder. I've tried both DHCP and Roaming. I had a look on the back of my Acer, and it hasnt got a serial port, nor a parallel port. My arm is getting sore from all this dead horse flogging. Glenn.