when I had a Mac and two PCs networked, it was real simple. The Mac was easier to set up than the PCs. I think I found the info online. The mac could access any shared drive and printers, if the drivers were installed for the printers.

Dave T2

If you budget permits, you can try windows home server, which supports both windows and macs.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx

Perfect for adding additional drives as you need them.
I believe several online retailers have the software only version.
(Otherwise it's usually bundled with a server from someone like HP...).

Not sure you really need a "server", I've always run just a "peer to peer" network, off a gigabit switch. Selecting which stuff to share is a deep subject, I used to just share everything everywhere, but now I tend to just pick certain folders on every machine to share and other folders to give read AND write privileges to. I have two macs in my home setup and 8 pcs. The macs network fairly well, although there are known bugs in snow leopard, used to see my windows network automatically, but now I have to do a Command K, to call up my pc shares. Pretty common problem, but easy fix. Leopard has it's own set of issues but, all in all, they work quite well.

Here I just added a Wireless Router - plugs via ethernet into Cable Modem - the Router has various ethernet connections to some computers, and all the rest use the Wireless part. Mixture of PCs, MACs, iBooks, iPhones; all happy. With all the PCs you can set up in each what you want to share or not. Make sure to password protect the Wireless connection. Ethernet is fastest.

Make sure they all use the same WORKGROUP name. This is buried somewhere inside the network options for both MAC and PC.

The same workgroup name is handy, but not essential. If they're all the same name then they'll be visible in each other's local groups. If not, they're still visible under "entire network". And in either case, or even if they're not visible at all any of them can still be accessed by typing in the connection name in the form "\\computer name\sharename".

I find doing the latter is often worlds faster than browsing the network to get to the connection.

ddm: What sort of issues does Snow Leapard have, and are there workarounds?
I run 3 pc's and a macbook pro with snow leapard using a 1G switch and the mac can take 20 min to forever to "see" my pc's.
I use the same workgroup name for them all.

The workaround that I found, after seeing tons of post on the disappearing windows network connection issue in snow leopard, is doing a Command K, it immediately pops up a "connect to:" type screen and you can then see your connections and connect to the computer of your choice, once connected it usually stays visible in the finder, until it doesn't, of course. Anyway, the workaround is actually pretty fast and works most of the time. Every once in a while I have to restart both machines in order for the mac to connect.

BTW, the "command k" command needs to be done with the finder (or desktop) active.

Thanks, I'll give that a try.

Anyone knows why shared folder on Mac my PC sees and i can grab files from but can't write to?

Read Only maybe ? Check the attributes on your shared folders.

geoff

"Anyone knows why shared folder on Mac my PC sees and i can grab files from but can't write to?"

1 possibility: OSX can read but not write to NTFS drives.
there's apps you can buy to get around this. or you could use FAT or FAT32 disc format, which is fine if there's nothing on the drives of consequence (FAT/FAT32 have no built-in error checking like NTFS / OSX extended).

not sure that's the answer, but it came to mind when i read that.

That's probably not the case, since the target computer hosting the shared drive will actually be doing the writing. The Mac merely hands file data over to the PC and asks "pretty please, store this on your drive for me?" The Mac OS doesn't interact with the NTFS drive at all.

Likewise, the servers in my house are all formatted for ext3 under Linux. Windows can't read/write that file system; it might not even recognize that it's a formatted drive. It doesn't matter though because the linux computer hosting the drive knows how to read and write it and it happily accepts requests from the Windows computers on the network.