PC Maintenance Class 5: Term 1

Many people these days have more than one computer at home, be it a laptop and a desktop computer. Sharing resources between these machines is a sensible thing to do. Gone are the days where we need to kit out each computer with it’s own printer. Networking is quite easy to setup.

Tonight we examined the components that you need, and how network configurations are generally setup and implimented.

• Network Card
• Bag of Network Cables  (Cat 5 or Cat 6)
• Ethernet Switch.

We discussed how you can you can attach a local resource such as a printer to one workstation and make it available to the other computers in the house.  However the one draw back to this setup is that Computer 1 with the printer attached to it must be on at all times.

Introducing wireless into the home is something that lots of people are doing, with laptops, netbooks and even mobile phones these days. The above screen shot shows a typical ‘Virgin Media’ setup, with a cable modem.

Ramping up the complexity, you can see from this simplified diagram, how a bigger network in a school or business might well be setup. In this diagram this network is centred around three file servers. In computing, a file server is a computer attached to a network that has the primary purpose of providing a location for shared disk access, i.e. shared storage of computer files (such as documents, sound files, photographs, movies, images, databases, etc.)

Wireless broadband allows you to get online anywhere in your home without having to run wires around the house and means that the whole family can get online at the same time. But before you start surfing the web in your back yard, make sure your network is safe and secure.

When you set up a wireless network in your house, the broadband signal is sent out from your router - it’s no longer necessary to physically connect your computer to your modem using an ethernet cable, and your network is no longer contained by the walls of your house. While this is great for you, it creates a whole new set of security challenges; protecting your wireless network is essential if you want to keep your connection private and hacker-free.

Download tonight’s presentation (in Adobe PDF format)  – Networking Presentation.