How to Set Up a Home Network

In the world of computers, networking is the practice of linking two or more computing devices together for the purpose of sharing data. Some people ask why should I need to set up a home network. There are several advantages to setting up a home network. Often you might want a file or program they've downloaded from the Net to be available to all of the computers at home. With a home network files can be shared more conveniently, faster eliminating passing files around on floppies or CD and sharing files. You can also copy or move files remotely, without needing physically visit the computer involved.You can share printers, CD-ROM drives and any other removeable drives between the computers. With home networking you can share a single Internet connection between two or more computers to save money. One computer will connect to the Internet with a modem and the other computer will route its Internet traffic through the same connection. If you like playing multi-user computer games that have network capabilities built in, then two people can play these games together over the network. Also you can save space on other PC's hard drives, by storing larger files only a single copy of large files. Computer networking has existed for more than thirty years, but only more recently they have become popular in homes. In 1999, only a few hundred thousand households in the United States had a home network. When Windows 95 first came out, creating a home network was a huge task. Now there are ways to set up a home network that the toughest part is physically installing the hardware. There are a lot of things you need to think about before setting up a home network. First you need to think of what operating system you want to use. Before Windows XP came out the hardest part was dealing with installing the software and configuring it. Now, Windows XP makes it easy. You can network computers that run different operating systems, but setting up a small home local area