What is the best way to set up a home network?

jasno999 · Rated NC-17 Joined: 17 May 2006 Posts: 122 Location: PA

I have a wireless laptop and a wired desktop. I can access soem shared network files from my desktop on my laptop but it kind of confuses me as to how it really works. Seems like I have to share each folder sepeatly and do special things to get the folders shared.

I am confused by all of it and for some reason I can not get ceartain folders shared- can somebody break it down for me?

BeerCheeze · Posted: Sun, 04 Jun 2006 21:49:28 Post Subject:

Do it the easy way.. Windows has what is called an Admin Share at the root of all hard drives.

Every drive you have on your computer will have a <Drive Letter>$ share (i.e. C$, D$, etc). So you can just use those.

Blue|Fusion · Posted: Sun, 04 Jun 2006 22:21:23 Post Subject:

That's the simplest way, and way I did it for a long time. If you want to do it the way I do now, setup a spare PC (or even that used desktop of yours), setup a specialized folder in which all of your shared stuff will be stored. You can then access it locally and remotely. That's still pretty basic; if you want to get it secured like I do, too (because I get bored easily), than you can set the proper permissions and remote access usernames/passwords and whatnot. For example, I can only access the shares on my desktop from my laptop if I login the laptop as the user "rich" with the same password. If someone else logs onto the laptop or any PC in the house with a different username and password, access to the remote share will be denied.

jasno999 · Rated NC-17 Joined: 17 May 2006 Posts: 122 Location: PA

Yeah it is still a bit confusing for a person liek me with little to no experience with network setups.

RIght now I have some folders that are shared and many that are not. I will take a look tonight at sharing the entire C-drive. That might be the eaisest thing to do.

Basically at this point I jsut want to bring all of my I-tunes song files over from my desktop to my laptop. But most of my other files, while it would be nice to access them, I think I will keep them on the desktop and not share them. My reason is that this:

- The desktop is pretty old
- It is running on hope and dreams (seriously it is hurting and I guess from the abuse and the years it has begun to run very sluggishly and what not)
- I have downloaded a lot of programs to it over the years- deleted a lot too. Between that I think I have aquired a few viruses and I am nto sure if they were ever fully treated by AVG. But I think the damage was done.

The computer is still running jsut not well. I probably should try to wipe it out and re-install windows and work fro ma clean slate but since I don't know how to do that, I am scared to do it, and the computer might not be able to handle it and could give me a permanant black screen I think it is better to jsut use it for what it is worth in the time being.

Heck right now I have to put the windows recovery CD into the CD drive just to get the computer to boot up. Otherwise I get this message that says CD BOOT Drive: or something liek that and it gets stuck.

Kalo · Rated PG Joined: 15 Mar 2006 Posts: 20

Perhaps you can search for some wireless network setup guides?

jasno999 · Rated NC-17 Joined: 17 May 2006 Posts: 122 Location: PA

Kalo · Rated PG Joined: 15 Mar 2006 Posts: 20

lol, if only everything was that easy mah trend. Razz