Many households today have more than one PC. Even if each family member has his or her own desktop or laptop as well as a cellphone, the Home Theater PC, games consoles, a couple of smart appliances scattered around the house, and even a few gadgets in the car can all be networked so that you can store all your media centrally and share it between them. The first thing to decide about a home netwok is how much of it will be wired and how much will be wireless. You'll need Wi-Fi for your mobiles devices and laptops, but tethered computers (especially the media server and HTPC) will benefit from the bandwidth of a wired gigabit Ethernet connection. You'll need to try several spots before you find the optimal lace to put your router.Signal strength will be affected by distance, the number and type of walls between the router and each device,and also other wireless devices in the vicinity. A basic 4-port Wi-Fi router should e enough for a small home, since most of the devices will be wireless. Of course, the router can also be used to share your broadband Internet connection to all the devices.
When you have a network with three or more networked computers, t makes sense to have one central server. With a digital hoe entertainment network, you can store all our large movies files o the server rather than keep copying them between computers. This is also a good way to ensure that your precious family photos and home videos are backed up regularly-you can set up an automatic backup routine for the server and rest easy knowing that everything is safe. You could also just use an old computer that's just lying around. Pop in a gigabit Ethernet network card and a large enough hard drive, and just configure it to sit on the network with its data in shared folders. If all the computers on our network run windows, it might make sense to ivest in windows media center hardware and software to broaden your file-sharing horizons. Windows Vista Home Premium and above come with media center by default. Media Center Extender devices can connect to your TV and hi-fi sound system, and pull music and movies from your computers to watch on the big screen. These can be used instead of full-fledged HTPCs, but you lose the functionality of a full computer in the living room. The Xbox 360 also functions as a Media Center Extender, and is one of the most popular such devices available. If you want to stream music or video off the Internet to multiple computers on your home network, a god broadband connecting will be necessary. Anything less than 2 Mbps and you'll deal with "buffering..." messages and spinning hourglasses at very step.
As with any hoe or office network, it's also important to make sure your network is adequately protected with a firewall and antivirus /antimalware programs. Viruses and infections can spread rapidly over a network, so you'll need to scan even a pen drive if a friend plugs one in to any of the computers
When you have a network with three or more networked computers, t makes sense to have one central server. With a digital hoe entertainment network, you can store all our large movies files o the server rather than keep copying them between computers. This is also a good way to ensure that your precious family photos and home videos are backed up regularly-you can set up an automatic backup routine for the server and rest easy knowing that everything is safe. You could also just use an old computer that's just lying around. Pop in a gigabit Ethernet network card and a large enough hard drive, and just configure it to sit on the network with its data in shared folders. If all the computers on our network run windows, it might make sense to ivest in windows media center hardware and software to broaden your file-sharing horizons. Windows Vista Home Premium and above come with media center by default. Media Center Extender devices can connect to your TV and hi-fi sound system, and pull music and movies from your computers to watch on the big screen. These can be used instead of full-fledged HTPCs, but you lose the functionality of a full computer in the living room. The Xbox 360 also functions as a Media Center Extender, and is one of the most popular such devices available. If you want to stream music or video off the Internet to multiple computers on your home network, a god broadband connecting will be necessary. Anything less than 2 Mbps and you'll deal with "buffering..." messages and spinning hourglasses at very step.
As with any hoe or office network, it's also important to make sure your network is adequately protected with a firewall and antivirus /antimalware programs. Viruses and infections can spread rapidly over a network, so you'll need to scan even a pen drive if a friend plugs one in to any of the computers
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