if you have firewire you can do it with a standard firewire cable and the firewire network connection created by XP. You have to manually set an IP address to both connection to ensure they can see each other. The automatically assigned private IP's are not always on the same subnet and then you cannot connect to the other machine. Or get a network crossover cable, and again assign ip addresses to the network connections. Or get a USB data transfer cable and the associated software, laplink like software in some cases, others mount the other machine as a network drive.