Most of us think that Local Area Networking (LAN) is a very complicated thing to do because of the Network Cables, networking equipments and everything. It is true that networking is really a big topic to be discussed and is really complicated to do. But in Computer Networking, there are also the basics and normally it can be found at home.

In this article, I’ll be discussing the very basic networking for your home. This will be a step by step tutorial for your home. This will let you connect your computers and can also be used to play LAN games. To start it off, you need a couple of devices in order to build your home network.

Router/Switch – This device is the most important thing that you need. This is used for you to connect your computers.  This will depend on how many computers are there in your home. If you also want to use WIFI, a wireless router is also available which allows you to use both wired and wireless connections for your home.

LAN cables – LAN cables are used to connect your computer to the router/switch. To have a LAN cable, you have two options: it’s either you want to make one by crimping or just buying one at your local computer store. If you are just a newbie, I advise that you just buy one but if you really want to learn how to crimp, ask someone to show you how to do it or even watch a tutorial on the internet.

Basically, these are the only things that you need for your home network. Just make sure that all LAN cables are good and it ready to be deployed. A defective LAN cable can cause various problems.

Step 1 – If you have an internet connection at home, plug the LAN cable from the modem of your internet and insert in to the WAN port of the router/switch. This will share your internet to the computers connected to the network. Besides the WAN port, you will see a number of ports; this will be the ports where you will insert the LAN cables from your computer to the router/switch.

Step 2 – After connecting all LAN cables from your computers to the router/switch, turn on all computers do this in each computer. Go to start - control panel – system - computer name and click change and select the workgroup button and then type your desired workgroup name and just click ok if you’re done. All computers must be joined at the same workgroup for them to see each other.

If everything was done properly, you can connect to other computers through the network. To check, you can go to your network connections and select workgroup, it will show all computers connected to the workgroup. If some computers didn’t show up, try turning off your firewall by going to start - control panel - firewall. This would do the trick.