Some Networking questions

Ok, My G5 will be here on monday, and I'm trying to figure a few things out before it gets here.

Currently I do have a PC which I plan on networking with the G5 using panther. My understanding is that Mac's can see PC's but the opposite is not true, and that's fine for what I'm doing; however a couple more questions.

I've got a USB HP printer that I'd like to keep on my PC, and map the Printer and hard drives on the PC to my Mac, and I just want to make sure that its "do-able."

I'm fairly confident that I can map to the drives, although I don't know the technique yet. The printer i know you should be able to do it, I just dunno how.

Any help with these networking questions would be most appreciated.

This is abolsutely do-able.

PC's can see Macs, and Macs can see PC's, out of the box. There is nothing else you must add in order for this to work. Getting it to "work", is another question. For the most part, if you share out your hard drive(s) on your PC, then technically, the Mac should see these shares and be able to connect to them ( there is no "mapping" in OS X, it is called "connecting", still not used to it myself, but you have been in a windows world, where they have blinded you from other possibilities ) Also, when you turn on Windows File Sharing in your Control Panel, the Windows machine should be able to see the Mac. So this can happen.

First share out the drives on your Windows machine. After you have completed this, to "connect" to the drive in OS X, you hit Apple-K to bring up a network connection window. Your Mac will search for all available network storage resources. Hopefully your PC is there

To see your Mac on your PC, you need to open an Explorer window in Win2K/XP and then in the "My Network Places" in the left column, you click the + symbol. Then you click the + symbol next to "Computers Near Me". Hopefully this will work for you just like this. Sometimes it doesn't

As far as printers are concerned, this is one area that Apple needs to tighten up a little. You need to run an external printer system called CUPS, which will allow you to connect to your shared printer on your Win2K/XP machine. Here is a link to more information than you should need to know to get printers working in Apple Mac OS X : http://developer.apple.com/printing/. Good luck Somebody else could probably help you out better. I don't print with my Mac, it is too much of a pain in the ass. My printer isn't supported, and when you rig it, the result is abolute trash. I'll save this rant for another day