Friend and I want to set up a small temporary network so friends can come over and easily "EXCHANGE FREE LINUX DISTROS" from one anothers PC's.

Is this as easy as just all of us plugging into the 4 ports on a router and sharing, or is there more we'd have to do?

you said it.

Or swap sata drives

depends on your definition of "fast" is.

Depends what the context is, especially considering I didn't mention that the connection had to be fast.

Not instant is fine, we'll likely be getting plastered while it happens, but as fast as it can be over a router.

Would we just show up in each others networks or would there be any other settings to configure. I set up and reconfigure my home network all the time, but never in this way.

You got the jist heh i see, for legal purposes.

If yer dealing with vastly different versions of windows, (ie. 98SE and Vista), there might be issues. You'll definitely have to disable/enable the NIC or release/renew the IP address before anything will work.

As long as you keep the shares simple and just connect to the other computers with 192.168.0.x instead of trying to find them via network places, everything should be just fine.

You want a gigabit connection. I've only seen a 4x speed increase over 100mbit, but that could mean the difference of 3 hours versus 10 hours. Topsecret knows what I mean, he's copied many linux distros off me heh.