This is the "book" method promoted by Linksys. At our house, we want to share files and a cable modem link, so we have the cable modem connected to one of two ethernet cards in a desktop machine, and the second ethernet card is connected to one of the four ethernet ports on the Linksys router. We connect 2 laptops to the network using Linksys PCMCIA cards, sharing files and internet access. The laptops are configured to get to the internet thru and intermediate machine. All computers are running XP.