I finally took sometime from work and installed LAn berweeen my laptop and desktop (using a crossover cable). Everything works fine, except that it took much longer than I anticipated; it has been 4 years I have not done anything in LAN set-up and management, I guess I got rusty.

Anyway, the real issue is:
I want to be able to store the web page files in one computer (using vhosts), but be able to call them up with different browsers from either computer over the network, for testing.

At this point, both computers have:
Apache, PHP, etc. installed and working
"Hosts" file properly configured

Any thoughts, pointers or suggestions?

If you're accessing them via the filesystem, then you won't be able to use server-side mechanisms (file inclusion, HTTP headers, default directory index files, etc.).

Relative URLs will be helpful.