Wireless is not 54mbps. Thats the link speed. I suggest you use something like iperf to test your real world speeds. Typically, I get between 10-20 mbps (megaBITS) depending on the location. I think the theoretical max is 24 or 27. So anywhere between 1 and 2 metaBYTES per second. Youre still transfering on the wireless. Disable your wireless adapters before you try the crossover trick.
Oh, while Iām at it, my fancy wireless-n 300mbps tops off at a real world speed for 38-42mbps. So maybe 4 megabytes per second.
I just did this with two desktop PCs, one running XP, the other, Win7. With a gigabit card in each, I assigned a static IP to one of 10.0.0.7 and the other, 10.0.0.6.
Gigabit cards can figure out the connections and should work with a straight or crossover cable, and mine did. No software firewall needed, so disable it.
Then I mapped a drive from Computer A on Computer B and vice-versa. Now all I had to do was copy from one drive to another. Worked great. Hope yours works as well.