Is a crossover cable necessary here

Question

I am trying use an ethernet cable to connect my iMac G5 directly to an Acer laptop running Windows XP. Have turned on SMB file sharing on the Mac, have a file for sharing set up on the laptop. Everything I've read in the discussions and Apple's support pages seem to indicate that the Mac should auto-detect the laptop, or that I should be able to get my Mac to show up on my laptop's "My Network Places" using the connection wizard or other method, but it's just not happening. What I've read in the discussions and suppport area also indicate that a crossover cable shouldn't be necessary -- or could that not be the case? If you have any insight into why I can't get this to work, I'd be most grateful if you could share it.
Thanks,
Dave
iMac G5 Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Answer 1

Thanks Barbara, that helped a bit. But actually what I was really missing was a little fact that you need know: how to give an IP address to each computer when they are just two machines connected with no internet connection. In case anyone reading this needs to know, the following on how to name the ip address for the Windows machine here from http://www.smartcomputing.com/Editorial/article.asp?article=articles/2004/w1510/ 38w02/38w02.asp :
"Click Start, My Network Places, and Local Area Connection.
Click the Properties button on the General tab of the Local Area Connection Status window. Scroll through the list of connections, if necessary, and click Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). Then click the Properties button.
On the next window, click the Use The Following IP Address radio button and type your IP address and subnet mask. For home or office networks, you should use internal IP addressing, in the form of 192.168.0.x (where x represents any number from 1 to 256). For example, if you use 192.168.0.1 for the first computer, use 192.168.0.2 on the second computer. For this IP range, your subnet on both PCs must be 255.255.255.0.
Click OK and Close. "
To give the Mac its ip address you go to the Finder under Network, and TCP/IP -- I hope Apple can put this in their support pages, would have saved me hours.