I've got a pentium 75 laptop, its a NEC Versa 2200C. It's a great little box, which I picked up about a year or two ago for 150$ (first version of this document 2003-12-06 18:57:02 EST). It's got 16mb of ram, which is plenty for dos, and its also plenty for me. I ran debian linux on it for a while, but I quickly switched to dos.
I wanted to backup my dos laptop data onto my windows computers that have cdrom recorders on them. This way all the valuable work I do on my dos laptop can be backed up. That's something else I will have to write about eventually, backups. It's so important to do regular backups, it's terrible to see your data get destroyed by a hard drive crash or by anything else. I have a healthy paranoia about data integrity ;)
Btw, if anyone is selling a toshiba t1000 (the first laptop ever!), please contact me ;) It has dos 2.11 on a rom chip ;p Sept 2005 Update: David Lund has gratiously sent me enough gear and the famed Toshiba T1000 to keep me happy for many years! Thank you David.
Now back to the networking aspect of it: You're probably familiar with network neighborhood and tcp/ip. If so, great. If not, you'd better read some information on those topics or play with a windows network before attempting to hook up a dinosaur dos box to your windows network.
Before we continue, I will let you know of some important notes: Firstly, we are going to use Microsoft Network Client 3.0 to connect your dos computer (laptop or desktop) to your windows network. This software takes a lot of memory, more than 200 kb if you use tcp/ip to connect to your windows network. Secondly there is another software called Lantastic from Artisoft that can do the same thing as Microsoft Network Client 3.0 but it is not free. Supposedly it takes less memory and is easier to use. Eventually I will try that software and tell you about it.
You need drivers for your network card. For a desktop computer (unlike a laptop) it's pretty easy. All you need are the ndis2 drivers for your nic which usually come with your network card -- most likely you don't have this, so you will have to play hunt the driver disk and find it on the net. If you are using a dos laptop, you also need the ndis2 driver for your network card but you also need some other drivers, read about pcmcia for a dos laptop. You integrate the ndis2 drivers into the Microsoft Network Client 3.0 disks and then install it.
Now if you have a dos laptop you've got the nic working. You should have some lights on the little box that connects to your pcmcia card, which is called the 'dongle'. If you have a regular computer you only need one driver, the ndis2 driver. Laptop users also need the ndis2 driver.
Now the instructions become the same for both types of users, and you get your ndis2 driver off your network card driver disk and integrate it into the Microsoft Network Client 3.0 which is the software that talks the network protocol to the rest of your windows network. If you don't have your driver disk yet, good luck navigating the information highway.
You now download the two disks for the Microsoft Network Client 3.0. You extract each self-extracting exe into its own disk. Then you have to customize it to suit your network card. You do this by editing a file on one of the disks and copying your ndis2 driver onto one of the disks. You then use these two disks to install the software. This is explained in detail and with screenshots from wown.com, which is the site I will be referencing.
Get the Microsoft Network Client 3.0 and configure it. This can be a little tough to follow as most of the instructions are good except for the fact that he is telling you about how to do it for an IPX and a NetBEUI based network. If you want to do it for a TCP/IP network, which is generally the case these days, then you have to visit his specific page that has a couple more specific instructions for TCP/IP. You have to change the protocol option which was tricky for me as I did not know that I had to use the tab-key at first to change the selected box. Keep that in mind, it might save you a few gray hairs ;)
You have to first integrate the ndis2 driver with the installation disks before installing the Microsoft Network Client 3.0 and configuring it.
Follow these instructions and you should be alright. You can map network shares to dos directories, which is fantastic. You can even share your dos directories to your windows computers, which means your dos computer becomes a file server. I haven't yet done this but I'm going to, as it should make backing up my dos laptop data easy as pie. Sept 2005 Update: I have done this and it works very well.
There are more things to pursue which I'm going to be doing later, like making a dos network boot disk, that is a disk that boots dos and connects to your network and maps a network drive to a local drive. This could be used for all sorts of neat things, not least of which to install win98 from a network drive. Now that's funky. Useful too, if your computer doesn't have a cdrom drive ;)
NOTE: I read somewhere that you can't map network drives that are longer than 8 characters (at least using MS Net Client 3.0) Don't let this bite you in the rear ;)
This page has tons of information regarding different clients to connect your dos computer to your windows network. I only talked about using MS Client; there are more options outlined there.
The DOS Networking page at DOS Solutions is chock full of info on a bunch of networking protocols, not just TCP/IP.