NETWORKING BENEFITS

Home networks have always been seen as something only capable of being accomplished by a scientist. This is no longer the case. As technology becomes more user friendly, so does the way we can apply principles to makes our daily lives easier to live. Imagine if you will, a home with electronic devices working with each other to make tasks easier to do. One good example would be the use of a printer in your network. Lets say you had this printer downstairs in your living room. You are working on a project upstairs in your office area. Once you are finished, you will need to print out your project. Since your printer is not connected to your network, or if you don't even have one setup, you will have to save your work on a removable storage medium. That might include a thumb drive, a CD/DVD, or an external hard drive. Then you will have to go downstairs and connect your storage device to the computer and find the folder where your project is at. Finally you are able to print your project. See how much work that took just to print out a file. Now if this printer was connected to your network, you would have been able to print directly from your computer upstairs to the printer downstairs. All you had to do is pick up the freshly printed copy of your project.

As you can see, this scenario explains the benefits of home networks. Some networks might include only two computers and a printer, but others might be more complex and include dozens if not hundreds of computers all communicating with each other. Once a network is up and running, you will be able to share resources, communicate with other devices, and will make everything in your network unison. As I talked about earlier, printer sharing is one of the services offered in home networking. The image above depicts a network and the devices within that network. As you can see desktops, game systems, laptops, and many other devices are all part of this network. The use of a switch enables the expansion of the network. The router supplies internet and networking to all of these devices. From the network image shown, we can assume Computer #1 has all your media files. This might include movies, music, and photos. Computer #2 has all your work related files: schedules, programs, presentations, and so forth. Because these two are part of the network, you are able to share all those files in those two computers. With your laptop, you can steam your music and movie files. With your PDA, you can access your work files and be able to edit, delete, or whatever else you want to do with them. I can keep explaining what the other devices can do, but you get the point.