To help answer it I’ve put together a short article and video .. See Hubs and Switches 

It is currently only used by a small minority of home/home office users but it will grow considerably along with media servers and media centers as data storgae moves from dvd/cd to hard disks (Flash drives) .

You can find out more here.

Here we look at the three common ways that it is accomplished. Choose the one that suits you.

USB flash drives

This in the days of the floppy was affectionately known as
sneaker net. You simply copy the files onto a flash drive unplug
it and walk it over to the other computer insert it and copy it
from the flash drive. See USB Flash Drives in the technology section

Share Your Folders

You can share the folder that contains the files. By sharing
it you give other network users access to the files. If your
files are in multiple folders you can share each folder but you
may find it easier to create a dedicated folder for sharing and
place all shared files in that folder.

You can find out more about windows file sharing in ..Sharing Files on A
Windows XP Home Network.

Central Location

This requires one machine to function as a file server and
you place all files that you want to share on this machine. In a
windows network any machine (windows 95,windows 2000,xp,vista)
can be configured to work as a file server.

The advantage of using a single machine to host all of the
shared files is that the files are all located in one location
which makes it easy to backup the data.

The procedure for establishing the shares is identical to
that discussed in Sharing Files on A Windows XP Home Network .
However in this case you only do it on one machine.

I remember several years ago reading that the DVD was going to go the way of vinyl and simply get replaced.

DVDs are used for movies and with many people moving to downloading movies from the internet the need for DVDs cluttering up the Lounge is probably coming to an end.

Blu-rays victory could turn out to be very short-lived.

In it the author described and environment were TV, computers, entertainment systems,domestic appliances were all interconnected.

You could read your email on TV, talk to your TVs , and you could put  the TV on the wall. Pretty much what you can see in the video below:

Fast forward 15 years and yes we have TVs that you can now hang on the wall but the networked home that the author envisaged is still not available.

But I believe we won’t have to wait another 15 years to see the introduction of a truly networked home were you can get your email and voicemail on your TV and surf the Internet at the same time.

Many people today are switching off their TVs and surfing the Internet on their PC. This trend I believe will be short-lived and will end when the TV and Internet get joined together.

And that is already starting to happen. Late 2007 I got a BT vision box which is basically a computer attached to the TV. It lets me record /pause live TV and download films from the Internet.

It is connected to the Internet via a Router and it connects to the router not with wireless (WI-FI) which I had expected but via the power-line.

 Although you might say that it is simply a ditial video recorder it does offer a glimpse into what is approaching and (IMO) show how fast it is approaching.

Which Way to the Future

Many forecasters have envisaged a future in which common domestic appliances are connected together an given some form of intelligence. I suppose you could say that that started many years ago with the teasmade.

However I think that is a long way in the future. The near future I believe with be driven by entertainment, home security and the home office.

The home network over the next 5 years will combine/connect the Internet, PC, telephone, Audio equipment and video equipment and mobile devices. But it will start with the TV being used to do what you could previously only do on a PC, and that is to access the Internet.

Useful Resources:

 BT Total Broadband including the BT vision box

You can read more are hiddenwires.co.uk 

So if you’re expecting an important call then…. the Internet will have to wait!

Well that’s not quite true. You see The humble telephone service is changing fast.

Companies like CallWave now offer a number of services that integrate the telephone (land line and mobile) with the Internet that mean you  no longer miss calls while online.

Not only that but they offer services that significantly enhance the once humble telephone. Services  like:

• Online Caller ID & Caller Name -Enable you to see the telephone number and name of the person calling you when you’re online
• Take A Message -CallWave will play your greeting and record your caller’s message
• Take the Call -You’ll hear callers as they are leaving messages and can even take the call or transfer it.
• Message Alerting & Delivery - Get alert notifications  sent to your email address or cell phone.
• Telemarketer Blocking -stop annoying telemarketer calls and triggers the removal of your phone number from the telemarketer’s automated dialling system
• Private Number Screening -Lets you see the Online Caller ID when it would otherwise be blocked
• Caller Greeting -Personalize your Greeting message.
• CallWave Fax Number -Fax is sent to your CallWave Fax Number ( U.S. phone number). Fax is then sent to your email address and also to the CallWave software on your PC. You can view it
  from your own PC, print it, save it, or forward it! Uses standard Adobe pdf file format
• CallWave Phone Number -Its a second number without the cost of a second phone line.

So if you currently use a dialup connection? And ..

• Don’t want to miss any more calls?
• Want to know who’s calling while your online?
• Want to block calls from phone sales?
• Don’t want the expense of a second line?
• Want to receive Fax as email

Then why not Take a look at what CallWave has to offer

• Google
• Yahoo
• MSN

Between them these search engines account for probably over 90 percent of all web searches. Using search engines is not that difficult but there are many different ways of searching that most people never get to use.

Basic Internet Search Techniques

To perform a search you need to decide on the search terms (keywords) you are going to use. For example if you were interested in going on a camping holiday you would enter the words:-
camping holidays in the search field of your favourite search engine.

Notice that I haven’t used the + sign as by default the major search engines will do it automatically so:

Camping holidays and camping+holidays are identical and tell the search engine
to show any pages that contain both words anywhere on the page. If you wanted to exclude certain countries you could use the minus (-) sign as follows:

Camping holidays- France -uk

Which would show camping holidays except those that contained either UK or France.

Plural and Singular And Case

Holiday is not the same as holidays and a search on camping holidays would give different results as for
camping holiday.

However search engines are not case sensitive and so camping holiday and CAMPING HOLIDAY are the same.

Getting more Specific with Quotes

If the words normally appear together then you can use quotes to enclose the words e.g. “mother Goose” or
“star trek” or “Dr Who” . You can even combine them so

“mother Goose” +book

shows all of the pages that contain the term “mother goose” and the word book. Whereas

“mother Goose” -book

shows all of the pages that contain the term “mother goose” and not the word book.

Setting Search Preferences

All the major engines let you customise the search results in some manner. You can:

• Filter out adult content (safe search)
• Increase/decrease Results on the Page
• Limit results to a particular language
• Open links in new browser so that you can easily go page to the search results page.

This you can change these setting in :

Google - In Preferences

MSN - In Settings

Yahoo - In Advanced search

Search Engine Toolbars

Google, Yahoo and MSN provide toolbars that make it easier to search. These toolbars add in to the regular toolbar on Internet explorer and means that you can search Google etc without having to go to the website.

Here is a picture of my Internet explorer with both the Yahoo and Google Toolbar added.

Not only do they allow faster searching they also provide additional features like popup blockers, spyware detection etc. If you don’t want them displayed you can disable/enable them by clicking View>toolbars and selecting/deselecting the toolbar:

The toolbars are available at:

• Google Toolbar
• Yahoo Toolbar
• MSN Toolbar

Specialised searches Video, Music, Pictures, Blogs, Local etc

Again you will find these options on the major search engines. These allow you to search just for pictures or music etc.

Yahoo, Google and MSN displays them above the search bar. Here is the Yahoo display:

If you click the images tab and enter your search query the search results will all be images.

Meta Search Engines

According to various Internet search surveys over 50% of searchers use multiple search engines to search. Which means they try Google and if they are unhappy with the results they move to Yahoo or MSN.

For those searchers Meta search engines are the ideal choice as they combine results from various search engines.

• Dogpile
• Metacrawler
• Excite

Other search engines that allow you to search multiple engines from a single page

• Whonu

Meta search engines tend not to support the advanced search features found with the standard search engines.

Desktop Search Engines

Are you always loosing stuff on your PC. Do you read something and then a few months later wonder what document or email it was in, so you can find it again?

If you do then you may want to bring the power of the search engines to your desktop. Google and
Yahoo and MSN all let you download your very own desktop search engine, that will index the contents of your computer and let you search for it.

Note: only use one of them

Public computers are ideal for web browsing, reading news checking the weather and accessing your favourite websites and that is about it. They are not  meant for anything that is private. So you shouldn’t be using a public Internet computer for:

• Checking your email
• Accessing you bank account
• Accessing membership sites
• Buying
• Transferring money via Paypal

In short if you are required to enter a user name/ password or credit card then it is not to be done on a public computer. Many will be aghast at the first on the list.. checking email, as it is  probably the number one use of public computers.

Logging on to your private email account from a public computer means that you have to enter a username/password combination. This information can easily be obtained using free/inexpensive  software or keyloggers on the computer.

If you are going to access email then access a non sensitive account like Yahoo or MSN and treat the information that you send/receive as if it was being sent on a postcard.

Microsoft offer safety tips on using a public computer. In my opinion they are next to worthless  as you probably won’t be able to change the settings anyway and if you can you may forget, and even if you do it is still not safe.

So don’t be fooled.. public computers aren’t safe, and you can’t make them safe so treat them as such.

Although email has traditionally been used for file and data sharing/transfer across the Internet it is not the ideal mechanism, and is becoming increasing difficult due to message size limitations on email, and the growing size of files that are being shared or transferred.

Online File Sharing and Transfer

One of the new Internet services that is becoming increasingly popular with individuals and businesses is Internet File sharing and file transfer. By placing files on an Internet server, not only can they be accessed by other users, but also by mobile users, and it is an ideal way of transferring large files across the Internet.

This makes it possible to give colleagues, friends, and others access to information without giving them access to your local network, which not only increases the security on your local network, but also makes it much easier to configure.

Regardless of the service provider they all work by simply copying the files onto an Internet server and assigning access permissions to control who can access the files.

Once on the Internet the files can be viewed by anyone with the appropriate permissions using a web browser and can be copied to the users local machine if desired.

Internet File Backup

Not only are Internet servers being used for file sharing and transfer they are also being used as a mechanism for backing up important data.

Today many people have very important documents stored on their home computers in the form of email, pictures, spreadsheets and other files. More worrisome is that many people even those who use their PC for Business don’t have some regular backup schedule.

One of the first rules with backups is to store the backup away from the PC that you are backing up and Internet backups solve this problem ideally. Not only that, they also mean that you no longer need to buy and maintain tapes and tape drives.