Creating a secure networking environment in Windows 7 is pretty easy. At least it is easy as far as setting up a network goes. In the past it used to be very difficult to set up a home network. You needed average people to have to do the work of network administrators to get things right. But now that is no longer the case. You can set everything up on your network to run a smoothly just by the use of a couple of network wizards that run on the system. In this article we will show you the several things that you will need to have a secure network running in your household. Computer security is very important and you need to make sure that your system is as safe as it can be.
The hardware side of things
The first thing that you are going to need to do is to purchase and the set up a router in your household. There are several brands that you can buy but you want to do a search on Google before you do. Make sure that the router has a record of safety and no known exploits that are not patched. Make sure that the router company regularly issues updates to the firmware in the system. Even though you do not hear about it as much, people do create exploits in the routers firmware and use it to enter a person’¯s network
Now that the router is purchased, there are several configurations that you want to make sure that it is set on. First of all, you want to make sure that the wireless encryption is on the right setting. You do not want to allow strangers to use your network. To stop them you need the right encryption set up. You will see three settings that you can use, WEP, WPA, and WPA II. Make sure that you do not pick WEP as your encryption setting. It has an exploit in it that allows it to be cracked in less than five minutes by someone who knows what they are doing. Use WPA II if your computers wireless card supports it. This will make sure that you have the best protection.
Now after that is set up, make sure that you turn on the routers firewall settings. Most routers these days are sold with a firewall in them. They help protect the ports that allow people from the net to gain entrance into your machine. A nice sturdy firewall will make sure that the bad guys stay out.
Setting up Windows 7
Now that you have the hardware set up, you now want the computers on the network to be able to share files with each other. You do this by setting up a homegroup. Go to the Control Panel and under Network and the Internet choose “choose homegroup and set up options”. This will give you the ability to share files with other computers. It will also make sure that you can place a password on the files so that no one that is unauthorized gets in.
As you can see, it may take a few steps but setting up a secured network with Windows 7 is very easy.