About Home Networks
Tuesday, December 4th, 2001Dear Dean,
Right now, I live in Philly, but will be moving to Altoona later this month. Having some noisy-neighbor problems in this Philly apartment [again]. The land lord agreed to let me out of my lease if I leave by December 31st. So, it’s back to Altoona.
I’ve had such a rough time finding an acceptable place here in Philly, that I don’t think I’ll come back here until I can afford to buy a nice house, that isn’t attached in any way to anyone else’s. The plan is to live in Altoona for a year or so, saving every penny I can. Then, we’ll see. I’ve learned not to plan too far ahead (like beyond a year or two).
Anyway, to our discussion of home networks: The advantages of a home network are:
Any computer on the network can share resources (like printers, CD ROM drives, hard drives, and zip drives) with any other computer on the network. That is, if you wanted to print a file to a printer that’s attached to your Windows XP machine, from one of your Windows 98 SE machines, a network would eliminate the need to copy the file you want to print to a CD RW or Zip disk and physically transport the disk to the other computer. You could just configure a printer in the source computer, and point that printer to the print device (the hardware) on the computer to which the print device is attached.
This also means that if you have one modem connected to the Internet, that all computers can share that modem so that multiple people can surf the web or read email simultaneously.
Further, if you only have one computer with lots of hard drive space and you wanted to allow your other, more modest computers to access that drive for saving files to it, a home network would be just what you’d want to do.
To get a home network going, you need the following. You can purchase all this at someplace like Comp USA or other computer reseller:
- Network cards for each computer you want to include in your network.
- Network cables for each computer. Each cable is what they call Category 5, meaning that it can carry data at rates up to 100 MBPS (Mega Bits Per Second). Such cables come in a variety of lengths (3’, 6’, 14’, 25’, 50’, and 100’). The lengths you buy is determined by how far apart your computers are from each other.
- Finally, you need a network hub, which typically runs between $50 and $100. Hubs must be plugged into the AC house current. Most come with a small transformer-plug adapter. Popular hub brands are Netgear and E-Link. I use Netgear equipment myself and have been quite happy with it.
- You must then connect all your computers to the hub, using the network cables discussed above.
Once you have the physical connection of the hub and computers, each one requires a bit of configuration. No big deal.
Think it over.
Later.
Tom