networking with Vista

So you have a few computers set up at home and you are now ready to get them networked, great! Now where do you start? Networking can be a cumbersome task but once you get the hang of it, it's pretty much second nature. With that in mind, on to the task at hand.

First off Vista features a network and sharing centre, it's here that you can set up and manage all your networks. You can access this from the start menu--->Network--->Network and sharing centre at the top. In order for your computers to be networkable they have to be discoverable by other computers. So you will want to go to each of your computers and turn on the network discovery feature. You can see this in the main window of the network and sharing centre feature. After this there are several other sharing options such as file sharing, printer sharing and media sharing. You can specify whether you want to share these aspects with other computers or not. From here you can further specify what kind of priveleges other people on other computers can have to your computer. These would be things like allowing people read only access to files or only allowing people with network passwords to access files on other computers.

Once you have turned on network discovery in the network and sharing section, you are pretty much set to go, again you will need to specify what will be shared and what won't be, but as you can see it's pretty easy to set up your networking in Vista.

Good luck!