So my friend Doug want's some help with his computers at his office. I show up and he's got a new machine on his desk, and wants some files transferred from his old machine. He wondered how big of a disk or how many CDs he would need to burn to move the files.

"No biggee" I tell him, "All your machines are networked, so all we need to do is let them talk to each other." I proceed to set up a central folder on his old machine and transferred all of the stuff he wanted on the new machine into it. Then I shared it out.

Went over to the new machine and changed the workgroup name on that machine to match his other one and Bang - we're talkin'. After transferring all of his files from the shared folder to the new machine, I imported his e-mail and address book information into his new copy of Outlook Express... and it worked the first time through. He was elated.

OK - it might not seem like a big deal (and it's really not), and it might even sound like I'm astounded that I was able to do something so simple as share some files between machines in the same workgroup. Here's the rub - whenever I do things like this for friends, it winds up taking 3-4 hours because of some stupid little thing that isn't quite right on one of the machines, or because I forgot to 'flip a switch' somewhere to make it all happen.

Not tonight. It all went off without a hitch. I was in and out of there in less than 45 minutes. That's what's so amazing to me.

I felt like Superman.