Mac And Windows 7 Networking Searches For About A Minute And Then Returns Nothing?

I have a home network, based around a wireless router which our internet is distributed by. The connection is fine for internet but not great for file sharing.I take a lot of pictures and save them all on my desktop pc. This is sadly a windows machine running Windows 7. I have been using this for a good few years, it has an internal RAID5 array which I store the images on.I am not looking to access these files from my mac using a faster interface than the wireless which is already set up. My mac has a gigabyte ethernet port as does my desktop. I have purchased a crossover cable to save buying a switch.I have set up file sharing on the wireless network which work albiet very slowly by looking on the network on my mac, waiting till my windows machine appears, logging on using my normal credentials and having access to my files.

If I try and make the mac use the wired connection instead by going to the finder Go>Connect to a Server and then typing in 192.168.0.100 for example in searches for about a minute and then returns nothing. I can ping the machine and get a response.From what I can diagnose myself is that the unidentified crossover cable network is not liked by windows at all and won't allow sharing of files. This is just an inkling though.