Chapter 50

Sharing Resources on a Network

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding your options for sharing

Homegroups

Turning on sharing and discovery

Sharing media

Sharing printers

Sharing folders

A local area network (LAN) consists of two or more computers connected through some sort of networking hardware. In a local area network, you can use shared resources from other computers in much the same way as you use local resources on your own computer. In fact, the way you do things in a LAN is almost identical to the way you do things on a single computer.

For example, everything you learned about printing documents on your own computer earlier in this book works just as well for printing on a network printer. Opening a document on some other computer in a network is no different from opening a document on your own computer.

Before you can access shared resources, however, you need to share them. You have more than one method for sharing resources, and this chapter covers those methods. Before getting into the particulars of resource sharing, the following section takes a quick look at some terminology.

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