Anyone lend a hand?

Including information transfered from several previous versions of hardware, my last computer has many years worth of programming utilities, source code, etc. that need to be transfered to the new machine. In the old days, before modern programs hid their settings in registry entries, it was pretty simple to figure out what needed to be repackaged and moved to the new computer. Nowadays, you need to rely on utilities such as Alohabob to do the job for you. I had decided to use a utility called Move Me (written by a company called Spearit). Their website was quite helpful, and their product is priced more reasonably than the competition. For a piece of software that will only be used once, it seemed unreasonable to spend nearly $80CDN for the high-priced spread.

Besides, Move Me was a free download. It would do all the work of determining what needed to be moved, and only after seeing the report of what would actually be moved, you could make the commitment to either "register" and pay the fee; or abandon the process. As a prerequisite, all you need to do is establish a network connection between the original and new computers, so files can be transfered.

How difficult could that be? With Windows XP on the new computer, and the built-in networking wizard, I felt confident that the network setup would take a matter of minutes - surely no more than an hour. So why, five days later, am I sitting here wondering how the heck this transfer is ever going to happen?

I first tried to connect an ethernet cable directly between the two PCs to set up a peer-to-peer network. That didn't work, and I've since learned that something called a "crossover" ethernet cable is needed for a direct connection. I guess this is something like the null-modem cable from back in the serial connection days. Next, I connected both computers to the internet router. After all, the router had assigned IP addresses from the same subnet to my computers, and I figured I should be able to talk among the computers connected to the common router.

Wrong!

Whether it's my firewall configuration, or something in the router, I haven't figured it out yet. I only know that my XP can see (but not talk to) the Windows ME computer... but the Windows ME computer can't see the XP.

Oh well, maybe I'll figure it out this weekend!