Home & Office Networking
Got several computers, laptops, printers, scanners, tablets and cellphones? Connect them all together! It opens up possibilities for media streaming, network backup, multiplayer gaming, and printing from any device!
Networking Benefits
Your home or office network is all the various devices that connect to your router, which opens many possibilities…
- If you have a server or Network Attached Storage (NAS), it can serve as a central storage facility for all your computers. You can back up computer data to it, stream movies and pictures to any of your devices, share files with each other easily, and have all of your data neatly organized.
- If you have a network-enabled printer, scanner, or All-in-One unit, you can print and scan documents and pictures from any device, including your phones and tablets.
- You can easily send and share files to each other. It’s much more convenient than copying them on a USB stick or portable drive.
- You can access your computers remotely. Got an office that gets cold in winter? With Remote Desktop, you can work from your couch, using an iPad or laptop!
- Want to watch content from your computer, tablet, or phone on a big screen? Just connect a Chromecast or Apple TV to your TV HDMI port! You can use your phone as a remote and watch anything from YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, or Google Play Store.
How to Print and Scan Documents from Phones and Tablets
Printing and scanning documents used to require a computer and cord… but not anymore!
- Most printers nowadays come with WiFi capabilities, meaning you can connect them to your wireless network and print from any of your devices
- If you are using iPhone or Android, you can download simple apps that allow you printing web pages, emails, and pictures from the phone or tablet. Open your App Store (or Google Play) and search for Brother, Canon, or HP apps
- You can even print to your home or office printer when you are away! All you need is a Google Cloud Print compatible printer. Doesn’t matter where you are, Internet magic makes it possible!
- Unless you have a very busy office, scanners are mostly a thing of the past, along with faxing! You can snap pictures and documents with your smartphones or tablets and save them as PDF or image files. It’s very convenient and free!
Benefits of Using a Network Attached Storage (NAS)
When you have several computers, tablets, phones, and external hard drives to keep your music, movies, and pictures on, you can put all your content in one easily accessible place and share it with anyone in your family.
- NAS is a hard drive (or several) that are connected to your network. This allows easy access by any number of computers. NAS devices typically have several terabytes of capacity, allowing you to store thousands of pictures, songs and movies.
- Most popular NAS devices use two or more hard drives in what’s called RAID – Redundant Array of Independent Disks. This allows to expand capacity easily or add extra redundancy – if one hard drive fails, your data is still safe on the other!
- NAS allows you to share and access files easily. Instead of copying them to a hard drive or USB stick, everything you have is on the network. Don’t want others to see some of your files? You can password protect them!
- NAS allows you to back up all your computers automatically. It’s easier than relying on external hard drives and much quicker than cloud backups.
Want Your Personal Media Server?
You can have your own media server, with all your movies, pictures, and music neatly organized and accessible to any device on your network – and even on the go!
- Remember the days when people had their own movie collections on VHS and DVD? Services like Netflix, Lightbox, and YouTube made these obsolete… but they typically offer a very limited selection of content!
- If you have hundreds of movies or albums already on your computer, you can put those on a NAS and then be able to stream them to any of your devices. The software to do it is called Plex and it’s actually free!
- Plex allows watching your content on any device, like your Smart TV, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, gaming consoles, phones, and tablets. You can see movies posters, descriptions, organize them by year, genre, or rating.
