Datasheet

Understanding Networks
670
That’s changed a lot. With Windows Vista, a network is something that your
13-year-old can throw together in ten minutes. Mine did. (Your results may
vary!)
The terminology doesn’t help. Ask a network geek — or computer store
salesperson — about the difference between a LAN and a WAN, and you’ll
provoke a tirade of inscrutable acronyms so thick that you need a periscope
to see out.
In the following sections, I cut through the bafflegab.
What a network can do for you
Do you need a network? The short answer: Yes. If you have two or more
computers, with one running Windows Vista and the other running Windows
98 or later, a network is well worth the hassle. You don’t need a fancy one.
But you do need one. Consider these facts:
✦ If you have a network, just about any piece of hardware attached to
one computer can be used by the other.
That dual-scan DVD recorder
on your desktop, for example, can be used by your portable, the same
way as if it were connected directly. A printer or (in some cases) a scan-
ner attached to one computer can be shared by all computers.
✦ All your computers can use a single Internet connection. When all
your computers are connected to a hub or a router, you don’t need to
pay for two Internet accounts or run two connections (over the phone,
or via DSL or cable modem) at the same time. If every computer on the
network is downloading huge files at the same time, you’ll feel the per-
formance hit, of course, but in most normal circumstances, you won’t
notice any performance change.
✦ You can use Vista’s features on data from other machines, regardless
of whether they’re running Vista.
For example, with Vista’s Explorer,
you can view pictures stored on a networked computer as a slide show,
even if the pictures are stored on a computer running Windows 98. You
can burn a DVD with Windows Vista’s built-in DVD burning support,
using data from any computer on your network. Even the Windows
Media Player and Media Center can work with sound and video clips
from other machines.
✦ You have an easy way to make backups. The easiest, fastest, most reli-
able way to back up data is to copy it from the hard drive in one machine
to the hard drive in another machine on the network.
✦ You can share documents, pictures, music — just about anything —
between the networked computers, with practically no effort.
Although
50_749419 bk09ch01.qxp 11/13/06 3:38 PM Page 670