Advantages and disadvantages of networking your home computers

Question: What are the advantages and disadvantages of networking my computers at home?

Answer: In today’s world, most people have a computer in their household, and some households have multiple computers. If you have a lot of music, videos, pictures, and documents that you would like to share among other computers, then networking them together is a great way to share. A printer can be setup so that you are able to print from any computer in the house if they are on the same network. You can also play multiplayer games on a computer network if you all have the same game. The great thing about multiplayer games over a network is each person has their own screen so you do not have to shrink the images to half or even a quarter size of the monitor. Some of the disadvantages to putting computers on a network is that the files that you have chosen to share are not private and that anyone else on the network may have access to copy, modify, or delete them. There are permissions that you can set per folder or for the entire hard drive so that you can prevent other users from making changes to your files. If you have a firewall in place, this can prevent access to your computer or prevent your computer from accessing other computers. Home networking can be very helpful as long as you do have security measures in place.

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