I have been trying to get a Local Area Network in our house for ages, today it finally happened.
This is thanks to Mr. Tarrant and my good friend Scud.
I should explain.
For those who don’t know, a LAN or Local Area Network is a means of connecting computers together which are close together. LANs give a wealth of bonuses to a system, the most useful is the ability to share files and printers, another bonus is for PC gamers, LANs give the ability to host networked multiplayer games via TCP/IP, allowing the dispense of hot-seat gaming or the ability to actually play a multiplayer of the game.
Mine was brought about originally by Scud, my computer needed to be connected to his home network in order for us to transfer a large file across, so when he connected it, I watched and learnt how to set up the wired connection and how to share. It turned out in the end that the sharing was the main part of scuds part, as I still couldn’t connect the computers together through our ADSL2+ Modem/Router which was supplied to us by O2, I knew that it was possible as some of the techies at O2 had said they had done it quite simply, this made me more determined to get it to work.
The turning point was in computing today, when I mentioned it to Mr. Tarrant, who said that the computers needed to be part of the same workgroup. This got me thinking, what were the computers’ workgroups? I got home, and found that they were all different, so if they were to see each other I had to change them to the same.
As soon as I had done this and rebooted, I was greeted by a load of printer installation boxes, meaning that the computers had found each others printers and were trying to install them, meaning that the network was up and running.
I have spent all of tonight configuring it with some games (so far I’ve managed Freedom Force and Worms Armageddon), and configuring the sharing so that I can access the files of other networked computers, then mapping the shared folders as drives.
Things can’t get much better on the computers at the moment.
