I have simular systems as yours with a Windoze XP machine and an A500. I have used 880K floppies to transfer files via CROSSDOS with ease. I had to format 880K disks to MSDOS with CROSSDOS on the Amiga first, as XP will not format any floppies other than 1.44MB.
I quickly became impatient with this process, and so set up a connection between com1 on the PC, to the serial port on the A500 via a serial cable and NULL Modem Box. Using Hyperterm on the PC and
Terminus on the amiga I was able to transfer files at speed of only 56K due to limitations of the Amiga's serial.device. Kind of slow, and terminus can be a pain to set up... but it was fun getting it to actually work.
I then bought an online copy of Amiga forever at:
cloanto which includes Amiga Explorer that offers networking between the PC and Amiga. This I found easy to set up following the included documentation. The interesting thing with Amiga Explorer is the capabilty to write ADF images directly to the Amiga's disk drive, controlled from the PC without the need to enter transdisk commands from the Amiga. Again this was a limited speed solution due to the max transfer of 56 K of the serial.device on the Amiga.
Adding a CDROM to my A500 changed everything. I burned ADF's (or software from AMINET), to CD on the PC, then simply made floppies from the Amiga with the excellent
Image2Disk. It has an easy to use GUI that is better than transdisk. You can even write adf images directly to your hard disk using:
HFMounter, and
fms.device. The advantage of this is speed, in comparison to writing ADF images to a real floppy. This does not work for most NONDOS disks, but can really speed up hard disk installation for lots of other images. You should have no problems reading the CD's burned on XP, as they both support the Rockridge standard.
