Trying to network 2 PC's via crossover?

I have an XP machine that I am using as the gateway for the internet and a 98se machine that I have been trying to network together. The hardware seems fine (both new nic's with green light's showing) Connected with a new Cat5 Crossover cable.
I have been trying to network my two machines all day so I looked up this thread. I have printer and file sharing enabled on the 98 machine as I need to be able to use the printer on the 98 machine and access files from both. I would ping to check the hardware but I don't know how to do that. Although I don't think that there is a problem with hardware being as it's all basically new and that the 98 machine can trigger the xp machine to dial up the internet but I can't surf from the 98 machine.

Any help would be much appreciated as I am unable to go any further with this on my own,

Thanks.

Do you have a manually assigned IP address on the same subnet for both pc's? Set them both with an IP address, then to test it with a ping, in XP open a command line box, and at the prompt type "ping 192.168.0.1" (without quotes) or whatever IP address you used for the pc you are pinging....then do the same to the XP machine from the 98 machine, this works from the command prompt in both OS's. I don't know if this will help.....

Thanks for the reply PAWO.
Yes the Ip's are manually configured, OK the XP machine has IP: 192.168.0.1 and subnet mask: 255.255.255.0
The 98 machine has IP: 192.168.0.2 and subnet mask: 255.255.255.0
Both pcs are not seeing each other on the network.
On the 98 machine it has a picture of 2 pcs (icon) in the tray and when I hover the mouse over it, it says "Internet gateway: Unconfigured" I don't know what this means?
I tryed to ping each pc and I got "Request timed out" on both.

Make sure that both of the computers have the same workgroup. Also if you think its hardware related, you can loop ping network cards. - ping 127.0.0.1

Beyond that, there is not much to it

What gateway is assigned for each computer?

Start things all over, on the XP machine right click on Newtork places and go to properties on the left pane, choose setup a home or small office network, run through the wizard, its VERY straight forward. Once that is done, take your XP cd and go the 98 machine. It'll load up and select perform additional tasks and then choose setup a home or small office network. Once thats done, if the hardware is good, it SHOULD work.