If yes, how? If no, why?
[Edit: Networking is not my thing and setting up computers by connecting to same network sounds complicated to me. I was more referring to a usb cable when I stated “wire/cable” and a file transfer similar to how we transfer files from a smartphone to a computer through usb cable]
In: Technology
Yes, there are wide variety of means that can employed to directly connect two computer together to transfer dat between them.
Of course in 2021 chances are that you have some sort of wlan or wired lan in your home that you can simply connect both computer too and use that to transfer files, but in the past it was a more common scenario to not have a common network available and the methods used mostly still work today.
One of the oldest and lest likely to be employed methods would be to connect two computer com ports together with a null-modem cable. We don’t do that anymore.
You can directly connect two computer together with a network cable without needing a switch or hub or anything in between. In the old days you needed a special crossover cable for that, but any modern computer will no longer require that and you can simply connect them together with any network cable you have lying around. It may still require some fiddling with network settings though, but thanks to Microsoft’s efforts it should be almost plug and play.
You can’t directly connect two computer together with an old USB 2.0 cable even if you have one that has two USB-A connectors, since those don’t support peer-2-peer connections. When you connect your phone to a computer like that, your phone has tow switch to playing as if it was a stupid storage device, your computer won’t be able to do that without some effort.
USB 3.0 and up allows connecting tow computer together directly, but you need to use a special cable that lack the whole power thing to prevent them from trying to power each other and causing an issue.
All of those are less than ideal.
This is why you may see even IT professional transfer data between computer by simply using an USB stick rather tn trying to set something complicated up. (If it is a small amount of data this saves time.)
Chances are that if you have two computer in a room and they can both talk to the internet they can already talk to each other and you don’t need to do much more other than use Windows built in file sharing technology.
You can set up a network share on at least one of your computers. The other ones should (if configured correctly) be able to send you files and download files from you.
It gets more tricky when for example you want to just plug your laptop into a computer. There the absence of an IP negotiation (e.g. DHCP) process can make it difficult to find the other person’s IP to connect to. Though if you already have access to the other computer, you can easily find the IP via ifconfig (Linux) or ipconfig (Windows).
Yes. That’s what a network *is*. It’s what you make when you plug an ethernet cable into the wall, and (with some settings changes so that the computers ‘know’ they’re supposed to be doing this) it’s straightforward to run a cable between two computers in the same room.
Yes. You could set them up to have a direct peer-to-peer network connection between each other and share files are you would between any other network computers using any old ethernet cable. They also make a USB cable with a controller in the middle that allows you to share files between two computers. Given that this question strongly indicates a lack of technical knowledge, I would go for the USB option.
Laptops are computers; “laptop to laptop” and “computer to computer” are the same thing.
There have been cables that do this for decades. With USB it’s even easier now. There’s not a whole lot of “how” here; just get a cable and connect them.
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