After you connect to the network, the first thing
you’ll likely want to do is see what’s on the network and access the
available resources. Windows 7 gives you three ways to get started:
Select Start, type network, and then click Network in the results.
In any Windows Explorer window, click Network in the navigation pane.
In the Network and Sharing Center, click the Network icon in the mini network map.
Either way, you see
the Network window, which lists the main network resources, such as the
computers and media devices in your workgroup. As you can see in Figure 1, Details view shows you the resource name, category, workgroup or domain name, and the name of the network profile.
Viewing a Computer’s Shared Resources
Your Network window
will likely show mostly computers, and those are the network items
you’ll work with most often. (The computers display an icon that shows a
monitor and mini tower computer; if you’re not sure, select View,
Details and look for the objects that have Computer in the Category
column.) If you don’t see a particular computer, it likely means that
the machine is either turned off or is currently in sleep mode. You need
to either turn on or wake up the computer.
If you see the computer you want to work with, double-click the computer’s icon. One of two things will happen:
If your user
account is also a user account on the remote computer, and that account
has permission to view the view the remote computer, Windows 7 displays
the computer’s shared resources.
If
your user account is not a user account on the remote computer, and the
remote computer has activated password-protected sharing, Windows 7 displays the Enter Network Password
dialog box. You need to type the username and password of an account on
the remote computer, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 3 shows a typical collection of shared resources for a computer.
Caution
Double-clicking
a network computer to see its shared resources works because the
default action (which you initiate by double-clicking) for a network
computer is to run the Open command, which opens the computer’s shared
resources in a folder window. However, not all the devices you see in
the Network window have Open as the default action. For example, with
media devices, the default action is either Open Media Player or Open
Media Sharing. Other devices have more dangerous default actions. On
some routers, for example, the default action is Disable, which
disconnects the router’s Internet connection! So, instead of just
double-clicking any device to see what happens, it’s better to
right-click the device and examine the list of commands. In particular,
make note of the command shown in bold type, which is the default
action.
The computer shown in Figure 26.3 is sharing folders named Downloads, Paul, and Writing; two hard drives (c and d), a DVD drive, and a printer. The computer is also sharing the Public
folder, which is open to everyone on the network and usually provides
users with full read/write access. However, it’s also possible to
protect this folder by giving users read-only access, or by not
displaying the Public folder at all.
Double-click a shared folder to see its contents. For example, Figure 4 displays the contents of the Paul folder shown in Figure 26.3.
What you can do with the shared folder’s contents depends on the
permissions the computer owner has applied to the folder.
Working with Network Addresses
In Figure.4, the address bar shows the breadcrumb path to the shared folder:
Clicking an empty
section of the address bar (or the icon that appears on the left side of
the address bar) changes the breadcrumb path to the following network
address, as shown in Figure 5:
As you can see, a network address uses the following format:
Here, ComputerName is the name of the network computer, and ShareName is the name of the shared resource on that computer. This format for network addresses is known as the Universal Naming Convention
(UNC). If the UNC refers to a drive or folder, you can use the regular
Windows path conventions to access folders and subfolders on that
resource. For example, the resource Paul on PAULSPC has a Databases folder, and the network address of that folder would be as follows:
Similarly, if that Databases folder has an Access subfolder, here’s the network address of that subfolder:
\\PAULSPC\Paul\Databases\Access
So, although you’ll
most often use icons in folder windows to navigate through a computer’s
shared resources, network addresses give you an alternative way to
specify the resource you want to work with. Here are some examples:
In the Network
Explorer, click an empty section of the address bar, type the network
address for a shared resource, and then press Enter.
Press
Windows Logo+R (or select Start, All Programs, Accessories, Run) to
open the Run dialog box. Type the network address for a shared resource,
and then click OK to open the resource in a folder window.
In a program’s Open or Save As dialog box, you can type a network address in the File Name text box.
In a Command Prompt session (select Start, All Programs, Accessories, Command Prompt), type start, then a space, then the network address of the resource you want to open. Here’s an example:
start \\paulspc\paul\databases
In a Command Prompt session, you can use a network address as part of a command. For example, to copy a file named projects.mdb from \\PAULSPC\Paul\Databases\Access to the current folder, you’d use the following command:
copy "\\paulspc\paul\databases\access\projects.mdb"
