Sunday, January 25, 2009 11:01 AM
Remember how annoying it was to get two computers on a network to share files between each other? I don’t mean on a domain or anything, but on a typical home network where you don’t have a domain controller or anything at that level, and at most you had a workgroup value assigned to each machine.
With Windows 7, getting your computers to talk to each other is SO SIMPLE. In fact, the least amount of work you have to do to get it working is entering a password. Here’s how it works.
Homegroup
When you install Win 7 and get to the network selection (Home, Work, or Public), if you select Home you’ll be asked if you want to create a Homegroup. A Homegroup allows you to join computers to an ad-hoc grouping on a network. If you opt to create one, you’ll be given a system generated password. This password needs to be entered for any other Win 7 computer that you’d like to share with.
Sharing Files and Folders
You’re also able to select what types of documents you want to share with the other computers on the Homegroup and implement enhanced security if you require it.
(Note: Pictures, Music, Videos, Documents represent My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, and My Videos of your profile)
But what if you want to share another folder not part of your profile, like say a VPC folder on an external hard drive? Opening it up to the Homegroup is dead simple. Simply right click on the directory, go to ‘Share with', and select Homegroup with whatever permissions you’d like (Read or Read/Write).
You can also select specific people instead of granting Homegroup-wide permissions, although this seems to be limited to only users on the same computer as the directory being shared. Which makes sense: the whole idea of Homegroup is that you *don’t* need to fool around with setting permissions at such a low level for a simple home network.
Who Needs a Media Extender?
Sharing your media with other devices on your network (such as an XBox 360 for instance) has become incredibly simplified. I never really tried with Vista because I couldn’t be bothered fooling around with Media Extenders and the clunky way it seemed Vista interacted with my 360. So let’s see how to hook up our 360 to view pictures from our Windows 7 machine.
First I’m going to put a pic in my Pictures library…
Next I’m going to go into the Homegroup admin screen and select that I want to share media with devices. This will mean that pictures, music, and videos can be accessed by devices that are *not* part of my Homegroup but that are connected to my network.
Now I’m going to move to the living room and start up my XBox 360, navigating to view pictures.
Notice that my two Windows 7 boxes, DLC-Dev and DLC-Dev2 are both listed, as is myself as the user since its *my* pictures, videos, and music that will be shared (remember, those libraries are linked to a profile). I didn’t have to do anything special on my Win 7 machines, the 360 just found them.
So now we’re in the available shared pics for DLC-Dev:D’Arcy and I can see the folders with image media available to me.
Going into the Pictures directory, there’s my image…
And there it is on my TV…
All of that setup with no Media Extender or anything else required to share with my XBox 360. Now let’s go back and look at the new options we have in the Homegroup admin.
By clicking the “Choose Devices” link on the main Homegroup admin screen, we see this…
Now that my Xbox 360 connected to my Win7 box, it’s now listed as a device. The default settings are to ‘Allow All’ to connect as long as they reside on the local network. If I wanted to, I could choose to Block All, and assign allowance based on which devices I wanted to have access. I can also do it at the device level by toggling the drop lists.
Summary
With Windows 7, not only is it really easy to set up a home network, its really easy to *share* files between computers and devices on a home network…which is the whole purpose of networking up your machines in the first place. Good stuff Microsoft!
D