Home network help

Hello everybody.
Iwould like to ask if there is any good guide available that I could read in order to create a network at my home. I have a Wireless router for connecting to the Internet, and I want o be able to use this connection both from my desktop pc nad my two laptops. Also , I would like to be able to share my printer which is connected to the desktop pc, and some files.

Can anyone help me please? :roll:

does your two laptops have wireless cards in them?
does your wireless router have multiple ethernet ports at it's back?
these are some questions, answers to which, will change the way you design your network.

Both my laptops have wireless cards, and also my router has 4 ethernet ports on it. I haven't thought about what type of network i should design, meaning wireless or utp cables, so if you could help me, providing some links to read, i would be grateful...

here's an option. keep the desktop wired to the router, by using a patch cable. install the printer on the desktop and make it sharable. now use your laptops to connect to the router using their inbuilt wireles card. all you have to take care of now is to make sure all the pc's i mean the laptops and the desktops are in the same workgroup (e.g MSHOME, or WORKGROUP) and you will be ok.
on the laptops, install the shared printer by using the printer installation wizard look for a shared printer on the network. you would be able to find the shared printer physically attached onto the desktop. once that is done you have printing facilities on both your laptops as well.

so now you have two laptops connected through the wireless connection, the desktop connected via the patch cable to the router, and all these three pc's can be used to look into each other's shared folders. so you can happily share files, and utilize the facility of a shared printer.

let us know how it all went

also you can connect your printer directly to the router, and then you can use printer even if the desktop is not running. the design depend on your demand for example why you want a network? or another questions...
visit this link for more info.
www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/default.mspx

hi,
adding the printer directly to the router is a good suggestion, but do remember you can only do that if the printer is a inherant network printer, i.e. it has a network card on it. otherwise you will have to end up installing the printer on one of the machines, and make it shared.