The Network and Sharing Center in Windows 7, 8, and 10 is one of the most important and useful Control Panel applications that allows you to see information about your network and allows you to make changes that could affect how you access resources. online.
Unfortunately, most people never tinker with network settings because they don’t understand what everything means and are afraid to screw something up. However, once you get the hang of the settings, you can solve problems yourself, increase privacy, and quickly set up file and printer sharing across multiple computers.
In this article, I’ll walk you through the various aspects of the Network and Sharing Center and show you some of the features you can use on a regular basis to improve your productivity.
Network and Sharing Center opens
The first step is to open the Network and Sharing Center. The fastest way to get to it is to press Start and enter network and. This will instantly display the app in the list.
In all versions of Windows, the application is located in the Control Panel. In Windows 7, just click Start and the Control Panel will appear on the right side of the Start Menu. In Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, simply right-click the Start menu and select Control Panel from the list.
In Control Panel, you can click the “Network and Internet” category and then “Network and Sharing Center”. If you are in the icon view, just click directly on the Network and Sharing Center.
Private or public network
The first thing you’ll see when you open the Network and Sharing Center is your current network and Internet connection. Windows 7 contains a little more information, as well as a few additional options.
In Windows 8 and Windows 10, they cleaned up the interface by getting rid of a couple of elements and merging other elements.
At the top, you will see the active network or networks, network type, access type, homegroup information, and connection information. The first thing to understand in this information is the network type, which is listed directly below the network name.
In the examples above, one is the home network and the other is the private network. This is very important because when you are connected to a private or home network, there are many sharing settings that are set to be trusted by default. This means others can find your computer on the network, possibly access shared folders, streaming media from your computer, etc.
Windows usually tries to figure this out automatically, so when connected to a public Wi-Fi it will use the public profile instead of the private one. Sometimes Windows will ask you if you want to enable sharing or find devices after connecting to the network, and if you answer yes, this will make the network private. If you choose “No”, the network will become public.
You can also manually change the network type to Public or Private depending on what type of privacy you want. This can be useful, for example, if you are visiting someone and want to make sure that no one can access any data on your computer while you are connected to their network. Change the network type to Public and no one can find your computer on the network.
You can read my post on how to switch between public and private for the current connected network. So what exactly does switching do? Well, you can see all the different sharing settings by clicking on the Change Advanced Sharing Settings link, which I’ll explain in detail in the next section below.
To the right of the network name and type, you will see HomeGroup and Connections. Next to HomeGroup you will see a link “Available to Join” or “Ready to Create” depending on whether the homegroup exists on the network or not. Homegroup makes it easy to share files, printers, and more between computers. I’ll cover this in more detail below in the Advanced Sharing Settings section.
Next to Connections, you can click the name of the Wi-Fi or Ethernet network to open a dialog box with information about the status of the current connection. Here you can see how long you have been connected, signal quality for Wi-Fi networks, network speed, etc. You can also disconnect the connection and diagnose the connection if there is a problem.
For Wi-Fi networks, this screen is useful because you can click Wireless Properties and then click the Security tab and view the Wi-Fi password. This is really useful if you’ve forgotten your Wi-Fi password but still have your computer connected to the network.
Finally, if you click on “Details”, you can get more information about the current network, such as the default gateway (router IP), MAC address, and computer IP address.
Advanced sharing settings
The Advanced Sharing Settings dialog is the main place to control how your computer interacts with the rest of the network. In Windows 7, you have two profiles: Home or Work and Public. Only one profile can be active at a time. All settings are the same and repeated for each profile.
In Windows 8 and 10, you have three profiles: private, guest or public and all networks. In fact, these are the same settings as in Windows 7, but more logically separated. Let’s take a look at the different settings:
Network Discovery – This option is enabled for private networks by default, which means your computer can be seen by other computers and vice versa. In practice, this means that when you open Windows Explorer, you can see the name of another computer connected to your network in the Network Locations section.
File and Printer Sharing – This option will allow other users to access shared folders and printers on your computer. I always disable it even on private networks unless I need to use it in a specific situation. Very often, guests come to my house, connect to the network, and then can browse my system. You can only view shared folders, but you wonder how folders can be shared without your knowledge.
Homegroup connections – If you really need to share files and folders, you should just set up a homegroup, which is more secure and much easier to set up. If you run into problems, just read my homegroup troubleshooting guide.
Now expand All Networks if you’re using Windows 8 or Windows 10. There are a couple more settings here.
Sharing folders – I recommend turning this off unless you specifically need to share data with another computer. The reason is that it is very easy to accidentally save files in these public folders without realizing it, and then they will be available to everyone on the network. A very useful feature when you need it, but it poses a big privacy risk otherwise.
Streaming media is another option that should be turned off until you need it. Basically, it turns your computer into a DLNA server so that you can stream music, movies, and pictures to other devices on the network like Xbox One, etc. When it’s turned on, it also opens quite a few ports in your firewall.
File Sharing Connections – Always set up 128-bit encryption unless you need to share files with Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows 2000 computers.
Password protected sharing – I highly recommend enabling password protected sharing because this will force users to enter a username and password for an account on your computer to access any data.
Set up a new network and troubleshoot problems
The next part that I want to talk about is the “Changing Network Settings” section. In Windows 10, you can either establish a new connection or fix the problems.
To set up a new connection in Windows 8/10, you only have four options: connect to the Internet, set up a new network, manually connect to a Wi-Fi network, or connect to a VPN. Please note that peer-to-peer networking is no longer possible in Windows 10.
If you click Troubleshoot, you will get a list of troubleshooting links for the Internet, network adapter, homegroup, shared folder, printers, etc.
These are not just troubleshooting guides, they are real programs that start and fix problems with various network services. I find the most helpful fixes for troubleshooting Internet connection and network adapter issues.
Change adapter settings
Finally, let’s talk about the Change adapter settings link on the left. You probably won’t use it too often, but it comes in handy when troubleshooting network problems.
Here you will see a list of all the network adapters on your computer. If you have an Ethernet port and a WiFi card, you will see both items in the list. You can also see other network adapters, but they are usually always virtual, that is, created by a software application such as a VPN client or virtual machine program.
If you are having connectivity issues, you can simply right-click the adapter and select Diagnostics. This usually fixes any problem with a misconfigured network adapter. If you right-click and select Properties, you can configure your computer to use a static IP address instead of getting it from a DHCP server.
As mentioned, this is not something you need to do often, but it is good to know for troubleshooting purposes. For the tech-savvy, there are tons of other advanced settings you can tweak here, but this guide is for beginners.
Hopefully this article will help you navigate the settings of the Network and Sharing Center without feeling overwhelmed. This is the easiest way to fix network problems and make your computer more secure by turning off many of the automatic sharing features that are turned on by default. If you have any questions, please leave a comment. Enjoy!
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