Windows 8.1 Bible

Chapter 39: Sharing Resources on a Network

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding your options for sharing

Getting acquainted with homegroups

Turning on sharing and discovery

Sharing media, printers, and folders

A  local area network (LAN) consists of two or more computers connected through some sort  of networking hardware. In a LAN, 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.

Some Networking Buzzwords

Networking has its own set of buzzwords. All the buzzwords you learned in earlier chapters still apply, but you have some new words to learn, as defined here:

• Resource: Items you use on the network, including a folder, shared media, a printer, or other device.
• Shared resource: A resource accessible to other users within a network. A shared folder is often ...