Category: Technology

Now that broadband internet connections are becoming far more common in the average home, so is the idea of setting up an in-home network to support multiple computers. Families, in particular, are showing an increased interest in the subject as they often will have separate computers for the kids.

If you know someone who’s interested in setting up their own in-home network who’d rather set it up themselves, yet doesn’t already have a working knowledge of local area network, consider the book Home Networking Simplified.

The book itself comes from Cisco Press, the print arm of Cisco System, commonly known for their networking expertise in the corporate world. Now that Cisco has become an owner of the residential networking product manufacturer Linksys, the company has started to look toward being able to support the average home computer user newly introduced to the idea of networking.

Home Networking Simplified is written for the computer novice, but without the stigma often associated with a “… for dummies” style book. Hundreds of screen shots of actual Windows XP dialog and configuration boxes will make setting up a network for file, print and connection sharing easy and understandable for anyone you know.

While working on a good number of computers every day that require a number of standard security and diagnostic software, I decided that using CD-Rs was entirely too time-consuming and wasteful. Instead, I’ve purchased a thumbdrive, which for those unfamiliar with the technology, is simply a general name for any small, removable drive built using flash memory and that can be plugged into any available USB port.

The particular thumbdrive I purchased is Sandisk’s 1GB Cruzer Mini. While most consumers could probably get away with one of the cheaper 128MB, 256MB or even 512MB thumbdrives, I went for a full gigabyte due to the large number of files I tend to move back and forth between machines.

The Cruzer Mini is nice and small, though if I was going to make another, similar, purchase, I would probably look for a USB drive that had a strong loop in order to attach the thumbdrive to my keychain.