HomeGroups

Let’s suppose there are two PCs in your house. Setting up a HomeGroup is incredibly easy. In fact, it’s as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

You can do the whole thing either in TileWorld or at the Control Panel; the following pages walk you through both setup procedures.

Creating a HomeGroup in TileWorld

Fingers ready? Make sure you’re signed in with an Administrator account. It doesn’t matter which PC you start with, although if you’re in TileWorld, that pretty much means it’s one of your Windows 8 machines.

  • 1. On the first PC, open the HomeGroup panel of PC Settings (Figure 27-1, top).

    To get to the right screen, open the Charms bar; select Settings; select “Change PC settings”; select Network, then HomeGroup.

    Now then. What you see here could be any of three things, depending on how kind you’ve been to others in the course of your life:

    On/off switches for Documents, Music, Pictures, etc.: A HomeGroup already exists, probably because you set one up the day you turned on Windows 8.1.

    A Create button: Everything’s set up right, but the HomeGroup hasn’t been created yet. Click Create (Figure 27-1, top).

    An error message: “To help keep your stuff safe, sharing…is turned off.” To fix this problem, select Connections (right there on the same Network panel), then click the name of your network. Turn on “Find devices and content” right at the top.

    Now return to the HomeGroup pane and click Create.

    In each case, now you should see something like Figure 27-1, bottom.

    Figure 27-1. Top: Welcome ...

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