Chapter twenty. Setting Up a Home or Small Business Network

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding Different Types of Networks 380

Setting Up Your Network 382

Running the Network Setup Wizard 385

Setting Up Wireless Security 387

Setting Up Network Sharing 388

Accessing Files, Printers, and Other Computers on Your Network 392

The Bottom Line 394

If your home is like mine, you have more than one computer in use. Maybe you have one computer for your work, and another for your spouse to use. Maybe there's a third computer that your kids use. Maybe you even have a laptop that you plug in from time to time.

In addition to all these computers, you probably have a bunch of peripherals sitting around. Probably a printer, maybe two, possibly a scanner and a PC camera.

And then there's the Internet. You have one connection, and all those computers and everybody wants to be online at the same time.

When you need to share files, or printers, or an Internet connection, you need to hook all your computers together into a network a local area network (LAN), to be precise.

A LAN, whether in your house, in a small business, or in a large corporation, used to be a big, hairy, very technical thing to set up and configure. You had to deal with routers, and switches, and hubs, and all sorts of protocols and configurations. Not to mention what seemed like miles and miles of coaxial or twisted-pair cable, and network cards that you had to install in every PC.

In other words, setting up a network used to be beyond most of us.

Fortunately, things have changed.

With the advent of affordable network cards, hubs, and cables not to mention easy-to-install networking kits the physical part of putting a network together has become much easier than it used to be. And, thanks to Windows XP, installing each PC on the network is now a piece of cake.

Really. Anyone can do it. All you have to do is connect everything, and then run Windows XP's Network Setup Wizard. XP's Universal Plug-and-Play technology is smart enough to recognize which devices are installed where (even those installed on other PCs!), and does almost all the configuration for you. You have to answer a question or two and you still have to plug in all the cards and cables, of course but that's about it.

With Windows XP, there's no reason not to set up a multiple-PC network in your home or small business.