HomeGroup

Today, you may have a network in your home that you use to share an internet connection. But it can be hard to share other things, like files and printers. Do you have one or more computers in your home but only one printer? If you’re like most people, when you need to print a file that’s on your laptop in your bedroom on the printer in your den, you probably e-mail the file from one PC to another or transfer it on a USB drive. And if you need to find a file but don’t know which computer it’s stored on, chances are you’re in for a long night as you traipse from PC to PC and search each one.

HomeGroup, a new feature in Windows 7, makes connecting the computers in your home a painless process. HomeGroup is set up automatically when you add the first PC running Windows 7 to your home network. Adding more PCs running Windows 7 to the HomeGroup is an easy process. You can specify exactly what you want to share from each PC with all the PCs in the HomeGroup. Then, sharing files across the various PCs in your home—and many other devices—is as easy as if all your data were on a single hard drive. So you can store digital photos on a computer in your den and easily access them from a laptop anywhere in your home. Similarly, once in a HomeGroup, the printer in your den is shared automatically with all of the PCs in your home.