How do I route internet from one computer to another via ethernet cable?

You don’t give much background on your setup, your OS, etc., so it’s hard to answer specifically. This should do the trick for you. The computer with a wifi connection (“server”) will need a spare ethernet port, and so will the other computer (“client”). When my router crashed, I turned my Windows Vista laptop into a router using that kind of setup.

I can warn you, you may need to buy a crossover ethernet cable, but if the computers are pretty recent a regular CAT5 cable may work. Another alternative is to buy a network switch. Run a cable to the outbound data port on the switch to the “server” computer (the one with wifi) and plug a cable connected to the other computer into any other port. The upside of a network switch is you can more than one machine through “server” computer.

Use a router, and a long CAT 5. Or if you have wireless there must be an Ethernet jack on the back of that. Is there a reason why the NOT connected must go to the wireless? ? ?

I have Windows XP for the desktop, and a wireless card in it hooked up to my router.

There is an ethernet jack on the wireless card.

The computers I would be working on would be desktops, and I don’t have spare wireless cards to go around. The wireless router is in my mother’s locked room.

Well, Internet connection sharing built into Windows is probably the way to go. I can’t remember exactly how to configure it (gave up XP a while ago), but it should be easy to find with a Google search and wasn’t that different from Vista.

From here, you can connect the ethernet ports between the two machines and they should be plug-‘n-play via DHCP (kind of like plugging a computer into the router directly). Needing a crossover cable is a possible hitch, but it’s not certain.

You will need a crossover Ethernet cable to connect one computer directly to the other. After that you’ll need to turn on Internet Connection Sharing that’s built into XP on the computer that’s connected to the Internet.

@mrentropy is right. use a crossover Ethernet cable. The tx on one is the RX on the other.
crossover

Can anyone give step-by-step instructions to make it so that the main computer shares the internet connection and has file sharing that will be detected by anu computer that I connect to it?