According to a recent survey, 85 percent of Mac owners also own a Windows PC. No doubt most of them would like those Macs and PCs to work together—sharing files, hard drives, and other digital assets.
Unfortunately, while sharing all that between networked Macs can be simple, doing so between Macs and PCs can be anything but. While OS X and Windows both have built-in tools for cross-platform communication, getting those tools to work the way they should can require tinkering. That’s why we put together a few step-by-step guides to setting up file-sharing, screen-sharing, and shared storage on Macs and PCs. You’ll find links to those guides below.
For the purposes of this story, we assumed you’re using OS X 10.5 or 10.6. We provide separate instructions for Windows XP and Windows 7. The latter should work in the Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate editions. The one exception: Screen-sharing doesn’t work in Home Premium. We also assumed that your Macs and Windows machines are already successfully sharing a home network.