Setting Up A LAN Party

No, connecting two computers with a USB cable won't do it. Use a network switch like this one.

Recently, my friends and I had an all night long LAN party where we spent four hours setting things up and only playing games for an hour and a half. I had the audacity to think that my friends would set things up by themselves because they had Zarif, an IT student. Never trust an IT student to deal with tech.
“Why can't we just connect the LAN cables to our computers and begin gaming?” -- said Zarif, our resident IT professional. No, you cannot, Zarif. Technically, it is possible but without a hub, things would go haywire. And you cannot connect four computers together like that. Don't be a Zarif, buy a 10/100mbps router.  
Preferably a TP-LINK SF1005D at around 800 taka. Connect all the Cat5/LAN cables to the computers and router, head to Control Panel, Network and Sharing Center and click on Properties, Internet Protocol Version 4, Properties again and set up the addresses. One of the computers should be the Default Gateway. Your IP Address should use the following format: 192.168.4.. E.g. 192.168.3.1. The fourth number should be different for each computer and set the Subnet Mask to 255.255.255.0. It should automatically fill it in when you click on the empty field. The IPs we used were 192.168.3.1, 192.168.3.2, 192.168.3.3, 192.168.3.4. The Default Gateway for every computer was 192.168.3.1.
When you decide to play a game for an entire night, don't just say, “We're gonna play Rise of Nations!!11!!1,” like our friend Ahmad Reaz did. Yes, RoN is a fun game but you can't play it ALL NIGHT LONG. Pick games that span across genres.  
Have a game that is slow like Age of Empires II or Civilization IV, if you're feeling quirky; these types of games take up the bulk of your gaming time and require a good deal of thinking. Also pick a few FPS titles to blow off steam. Games such Quake, Unreal Tournament or Counter-Strike do excellently. For our LAN party, we picked Smokin' Guns which is a Wild West shooter that has some good depth. Next stop is a co-op game. After the third hour of gaming, your friendships will be strained. For me, it was after I played Red Alert 2. My friends did not appreciate my glorious strategic thinking; they labelled me as a loser who can only play one game. For this sort of situation, have a game where you can all team up and beat the computer. Examples include Serious Sam, Left 4 Dead 2 and DotA. RPG games would be a bad idea because they require a lot of time investment.
Patch your games and use the same installers. One game we all had was Age of Empires II, but it didn't work out so well. One of us had the vanilla AoE II while the other person had the 1.0c version. Get your games from the same source and patch them as necessary.
Ditch Windows 8-point-whatever. Your operating systems should not cause complications. Our friend Zarif had Windows 8, Ahmad Reaz and Zoheb had Windows 7 and I was master-racing on Windows XP. As usual, the guy with the latest version of Windows faced an immense amount of trouble. He had issues with his mouse acting crazy and then he would randomly disconnect from Red Alert 2. Compatibility issues are the bane of LAN gaming.
Have internet readily available. If one of you has a WiMax USB modem, it would be a good idea to bring it along because all the LAN ports would be in use.
Never listen to the cheapskate. Ahmad Reaz was a cheapskate and he refused to buy a hub. We had a 1mbps hub which caused more damage than good. We'd have been better off playing monopoly than laggy RA2.
Happy LAN gaming!