How to Setup a Home Network

Video Transcript

"Hi Michael Burton with michaelburtonfilms.org located in Salt Lake City, Utah and we are talking about using Microsoft Windows and now I want to explain to you how to set up a home network or basically to go through the Wizard Setup on your computer. Let me start off by saying that Windows XP is a registered trademark of Microsoft and I am in no way affiliated with Microsoft. To set up a home network on your computer you go through a few easy steps. There is basically a network wizard that you follow that will walk you through the steps. This is important because like for example I have a router and I also have a modem and I have to be able to set up my computer and tell my computer exactly what I have on my network. Come down to the start menu. You are going to want to go ahead and pull up your control panel and this will give you a few options here. Obviously you are going to want to scroll up to where it says network and internet connections and if you come here it gives us a few options. Set up or change your internet connections, that is not what we want to do, create a connection at your work place we don't want to do that, set up or change your small home or office network. This is the one that we want to do so let's set up our home or small office network. Now we already have my office network set up but this won't hurt running the wizard again. This is the network seup wizard. Just follow the instructions and it is very simple. Go ahead and click on the next button. This says before you continue review the checklist for creating a network. You must install the network cards, modems and cables, turn on all computers, printers and external modems and connect to the internet. Currently we have everything set up so let's move on. The next step is where you are selecting your connection method, how your computer connects to the internet. Right now I have mine currently set on this computer, connected to the internet through residential Gateway or through another computer on my network. You can either select this one, especially because I run through a router so I can either select this one or under other I can also click other and then click next and it gives me the option, this top one right here where it says this computer connects to the internet directly or through a network hub. My hub would be my router and my modem but I'm going to go ahead and reselect the computer as a residential Gateway and this is where you choose where your computer connects to the internet. This is my computer description and my computer name. I just call it office, this is my office computer and that way on my network this computer can have multiple computers running off of one network. I can tell which computer I am getting on to when I log on to one of my computers to pull files off. So go ahead once you name your computer, give it a description, click next. This is now going to be the name of your network. Right now, well my work group name is mshome but my network is Gums family. Go ahead and click next after you name your work group name. That is so that if you go into your work group folder you will be able to kind of the same thing it will show which computers are in your work group. This turns on and off your file printer sharing which is very important to me. This allows you to be able to print from any, if you have one printer hooked up to one computer and you have multiple computers on your network you can print from one computer still to that printer through the other computer and so the computer that we are currently on is my hub so I turned on the file in printer sharing because I print from my other computers directly through this computer. So go ahead and click next. Now this gives you just a little run down on your setups here before you click next. Basically it tells you your computer description, your computer name, your work group name, it tells you that the file printer sharing is turned on and then what you want to do is apply the settings. Like it says here you click next and if you wait for a second as you can see it is applying the settings. Now it says we are almost done and asks us what we want to do. Do we want to create a network set up disk? Use the network setup disk I already have, use my Windows XP CD or just finish the wizard. I don't need to run the wizard on other computers. I am going t click just finish the wizard because I don't need to run it on another computer because it is already set up. Then it says to complete the network setup basically it says that you should set up your shared documents folder, your sharing files or folders. Everything is already pretty much set up for me and I'm just going to go ahead and click finished and there you go. My home or small office network is set up. All of my other computers and my route should recognize my computer now on my network."