I'm not sure, first off the precision doesn't have an ethernet port at all!

Secondly, I'm not sure if a crossover cable setup will autoconfigure the network, as the poster above says, it has been since the 90s when I bothered trying something like that!

Right, that plan is somewhat foiled by most laptops not having ethernet ports anymore.

You don't need crossover cables anymore. You can just connect a regular patch cable directly between 2 devices. Modern devices can swap RX/TX as needed.

As for auto-configuration, that's up to the OS, but yeah you probably have to set up static IPs.

They would receive APIPA (169.254.0.0/16) address for IPv4 and link-local for IPv6, if the interface would be brought up. Now, that second part is a question; windows would do it, but linux probably not.

If both ends got APIPA addresses would they be able to talk to each other?

I was under the impression you have to set up the devices as each other's default gateway, but maybe I'm the one not up to modern standards this time.

Their randomly chosen addresses are within the same /16 subnetwork.

Therefore they can talk directly, without using a gateway.

Their corresponding Ethernet MAC addresses will be resolved by ARP.

The problem is that in many cases you would have to look at the autoconfigured addresses and introduce manually the peer address in each computer.

For file sharing, either in Windows or using Samba on Linux, you could autodiscover the other computer and just use the name of the shared resource.

There's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast_DNS though I'll admit I never properly tried it.