Everything below is from the Windows 98 screens. Windows 95 is close enough that you'll find everything in the same places.

The cheap ISA cards, the ones sold as "NE2000 compatible," can be fine, but they're where IRQ trouble lives. If your card has jumpers, write down what they're set to before you touch them.

Check it: right-click My Computer, Properties, Device Manager tab. Open "Network adapters." If there's a yellow exclamation point on your card, it's fighting something for an IRQ, usually the sound card. Fix that at home. I can't fix your IRQs in the garage. Well, I can. I don't want to.

Look at the back of the card once it's plugged into a hub (or at the garage, into my hub). There's a little light. Green means you have a link. No light means the cable, the jack or the card, in that order. Nothing in Windows will work until that light is on.

Anything missing: click Add. For the protocols it's Add, Protocol, then Microsoft on the left, then pick it on the right. For the client it's Add, Client, Microsoft, Client for Microsoft Networks.

Why both protocols? Because the games don't agree. StarCraft and some of the older games look for each other over IPX. Quake II, Half-Life and Unreal are happiest on TCP/IP. Install both and you never have to think about it again. If you have Dial-Up Networking for your Internet account, you'll see TCP/IP listed twice, once for the modem and once for the card. That's normal. The one that says your card's name next to it is the one we care about.

Primary Network Logon (the box under the list): set it to Client for Microsoft Networks.

Leave the IPX frame type alone. It's on Auto. Everybody's is on Auto. The one time somebody set theirs by hand, he spent the whole StarCraft bracket alone in an empty game lobby.

In the Network panel, click the TCP/IP line for your card, then Properties, then the IP Address tab. Pick "Specify an IP address" and type:

Seats are 1 through 16. The server is 192.168.1.100. Leave the Gateway and DNS tabs empty at the LAN. (Yes, this means you write down whatever was there before and put it back when you go home, if your home network needs it. Write it down.)

Your seat number is on the e-mail I send you the week of the LAN. It's also on the tape on your table. Two people with the same address will both get a message from Windows about an IP address conflict, and neither of them will play.

To check what your machine thinks its address is, click Start, Run, and type winipcfg. Pick your card from the list, not the PPP adapter.

GARAGE. Not GARAGELAN, not GARAGE1, not WORKGROUP, which is what Windows puts there and what most of you forget to change. Machines in a different workgroup still work for games, but they show up in their own little world in Network Neighborhood and nobody can find their shared folder.

After the restart, make a folder called C:\SHARE, right-click it, Sharing, Shared As, Read-Only. That's where patches and maps go so we can pass them around without twenty floppies.

Do not share your whole C: drive. Somebody at LAN #8 did, with full access, and woke up at 4 a.m. to a desktop wallpaper he didn't choose. He has asked that it not be described here. It will not be described here.

That's the server. Four replies means you're on the network and everything after this is the game's problem, not yours. "Request timed out" four times means go back to the light on the card.

1. You hit Cancel at the logon box. When Windows starts and asks for a user name and password, it's logging you on to the network. If you hit Cancel or Esc to make it go away, you're not on the network, and you won't see anybody. Restart, and this time type your handle and hit Enter. No password is fine.

2. No link light. See Step 1. Swap the cable with the guy next to you. If the problem moves to him, it's the cable. If it stays with you, it's your card. If it's port 5, it's port 5.

3. Wrong workgroup. Step 4. Check the spelling.

4. Sharing is off. A machine without file and printer sharing turned on can see the others in Network Neighborhood but doesn't show up in theirs. You can still play every game we have. You just can't be seen browsing.

5. Patience. Windows builds the list of who's on the network slowly, and after sixteen machines boot at once it can take ten or fifteen minutes to settle down. You can skip the wait with Start, Find, Computer, and the other machine's name.

6. You're plugged into the uplink port. On my hub it's the last port, and it's labeled, and people still do it.

7. You brought a crossover cable. I know. It's my handle. A crossover cable is for connecting two computers straight to each other with no hub, and plugged into a regular hub port it gets you nothing. Mine is the one with the red tape. It lives in my toolbox and you can't have it.