Selectable Internet Connection Sharing?

[scriptasylum]

OK, let's see if I can explain this well:

Both my wife and I have seperate PC's, both of which are able to connect to the Internet via dial-up (AOL). We only have one telco line so when I am online, she cannot be and visa-versa.

We are also connected to each other via LAN. I have manually set up IP addresses on our PCs (mainly to avoid DHCP which slows windows startup) and they can connect to each other fine.

Often, my wife is online playing some AOL game online which ties up the connection when I would like to browse the sites such as xp-erience.org

What I would like to do is to be able to switch between my AOL dialup connection when my wife is NOT online, and a shared connection when she is (which would then go through her AOL session). I would like to be able to open IE and with some type of software "toggle", switch which connection to use. Is this possible?

I have tried to enable internet connection sharing on both machines and the setup seems to go without incident, but I cannot get to a site unless I dial up to AOL myself. If I view Network poroperties, it shows I have an AOL setting (for the dial-up), a LAN connection for the network, and an internet Gateway for the connection sharing. This would lead me to believe I am close to achieving what I want; I am just missing a step or two.

I do not want to set up the internet connection sharing to be on all the time as her machine is not always on (not do I want to have to turn it on to connect).

Any ideas anyone?

 

[Zedric]

You can't have ICS on both computers at the same time. If you want to "toggle" you'll have to turn ICS on and off manually and localy at each computer each time.