Mac OS X or Windows? Nothing gets a flame war going faster than that old debate. But these days, many people are using both of those operating systems on a network. Maybe you have a Windows PC in the home office, but you've got an iMac for video editing and a Mac Mini for serving digital media in your living room. One big happy family? Hardly ‑‑ Macs and Windows PCs can't see each other on a network right out of the box, preventing you from sharing documents, photos, videos, music and even printers among your flock of computers.
Luckily, the ability to share files among all of your computers on your home network is well within reach. You just need to tweak a few settings before all of your computers are happily sharing.
To share files between a Windows PC and a Mac OS X machine, you need to enable File Sharing on both and create some common folders accessible to both computers. Note that we are assuming an environment of trusted users such as a secure home network behind a router firewall. These techniques will work over a Wi‑fi connection, a wired Ethernet or any combination of the two.
Also, even though we'll concentrate on Windows XP here, your steps should be largely the same if you're using Vista.
Setting Up the Mac (Tiger and Panther)
1. Open the System Preferences application and click the Sharing icon.
2. Select the Services tab and check Windows Sharing. If you're using Mac OS X's built in firewall, you may need to adjust your firewall settings as well to allow other computers in. To access the firewall, select the Firewall tab in the Sharing pane.
3. Write down your Mac's IP address, as you'll need to enter this later when you connect from the PC.
Setting Up the Windows PC (XP)
1. Right‑click on the folder you want the Mac to be able to access and choose Properties.
2. Click on the Sharing tab and select to option that reads: "Share this folder on the network."
3. If you want to give visiting users read and write access to that folder, check the option to "Allow network users to change my files."
4. Click Apply and then OK. That's it!
Accessing the PC From the Mac
In the Mac OS X Finder, click the Go menu and choose "Network." This will open a new Finder window with a list a visible machines. Select the folder you created earlier on the Windows machine. You should be able to access those files as if they were on your Mac.
For a slightly more sophisticated approach, you could choose the "Connect To Server" option in the Finder's Go menu and then enter the PC's network address.

Once the Mac connects, choose the shared folder from the list and hit OK. This should mount the folder on your Mac desktop for convenient access.
Accessing the Mac From the PC
Open your Windows Start menu and click Search. Select the "Computers or people" option, then choose "A computer on the network."

Now enter the Mac's IP address (which you wrote down earlier) in the search field. You should then be prompted for your Mac's username and password.
Once you've entered the username and password, you should see the home folder on your Mac and you should now be able to browse, edit, create and delete files just as you would on your Mac.