I know that there is information related to this in the very first sticky, but I have actually already managed to run a server within my router, and have a friend connect, so I'm not sure it's anything to do with port-forwarding.

I did it first on my mac (Snow Leopard), followed a youtube tutorial to make the start command. It worked fine, he connected on his computer by entering my external IP address, with a colon and 25565 after. We could see each other, interact and save the world etc. It worked fine. Thing is I also played on the same mac, which made it slow and sometimes unplayable for me. So I took a load of old parts and made a basic PC. Pentium 4 3Ghz (now slightly OC'ed at 3.3Ghz), 2 gb 667 RAM + built in Intel GMA. I got the PC to run the minecraft server, and could connect and play on my mac (same network) by entering the internal IP and port of the PC (192.168.0.4:25565)

I then connected to my neighbours wireless on my mac (we're friends, it's cool) and tried entering what my friend used to enter on his mac ('external-IP':25565) and couldn't get anything. Is there something I need to do on my windows machine running the server? It is using the Win 7 built in firewall.

I don't get any notifications on the machine or in the server window when I try to connect this way. And my mac just keeps saying "Connecting to the server..."

Thanks for reading, guidance greatly appreciated

rainbowarehouse