Networking iMac to MacBook Pro

[believo]

I'm trying to share my laptop with my imac and I'm having a little bit of trouble. When I connect using the finder>go>connect and i can connect; however, my access to the imac's hardrive is very slow. So instead I tried to create a network from the imac under airport. When I did this my laptop connects to the network and accessing the hard drive goes quickly and smoothly but now I have no internet acces becuase i'm using my airport to connect to a device. Is there a way to have quick access to both the internet and my imacs hard drive over the network?

thanks!

iMac is 10.4
MacBook Pro is 10.5

 

[richard.mac]

in 10.4 your MacBook Pro should show up in the network folder and in 10.5 your iMac should show up in the Finder sidebar under "Shared"

do you have File Sharing enabled in System Preferences on both Macs? make sure AFP is enabled on both.

Macs use Bonjour to network which is zero-config so you shouldnt have to use the "Connect to Server" in the Finder.