the same. My computer can not find any workgroups on the network and ping gives some weird results...
Which are?
You're going to need to be a lot more specifc here John. How are you trying to "find" workgroups? How are you pinging? What are you pinging?
Networking is 'layered', and the best approach is to solve one layer at a time before proceeding to the next. - hardware layer; most network cards have lights. Check that something lights up both ends when you plug the cable in. If you skip this check (or if your cards don't have lights) you can waste a lot of time playing with drivers and TCP/IP settings only to discover later that you had the wrong network cable.. very frustrating! - TCP/IP; Your IP addresses are good, but you also need a netmask (it should be 255.255.255.0 on both machines). You can probably ignore gateway and DNS at this point. Either machine should be able to consistently ping the other by IP address. 'weird' results need to be figured out before you can go any further. - Once you're sure that you have TCP/IP working you can worry about samba. Both ends need to have their own name (itchy and scratchy are good) and share a workgroup name (traditionally "workgroup"). Best of luck; feel free to phone me if you get stuck, I can definately do 'hardwired' networking!