Windows Homegroup makes it easy to share your movies, pictures, and documents on your home network. In this video, you’ll learn about Homegroup requirements and how to configure and connect to a Homegroup on your network.
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The Windows Homegroup allows Windows 7 and Windows 8 users to easily share documents for everybody in there home. Maybe you’d like to share your home videos, maybe you’d like to put pictures out so that everybody who’s on your home network would be able to access those all on your computer. This is easily done inside of Homegroup.
You simply turn on what you’d like to share, you click Go, and now it’s available to everybody on the network. To use Homegroup, your network profiles have to be configured for the home option. If you’re at work and you’ve configured network profiles for work, the Homegroup won’t be available.
And that makes sense, because this is something that’s really used when you’re in your house and just for the computers that might be in your home network. Once you enable Homegroup, you don’t have to create different accounts for everyone. You simply have a single password, and every device that’s on your home network can access all of the resources inside of the entire Homegroup just by having this central password.
I have a couple of Windows 7 devices on my network. Let’s configure a Homegroup on one computer, and let’s share the files and the information on this computer to everybody else on the network.
I’ll find the Homegroup in the Start menu under the Control Panel. There’s an option for Homegroup. And you can see that it tells you that there’s no current Homegroup on the network. We’ll see that works a little bit differently when we move to our other Windows 7 device. And it gives you an explanation about what you can do with Homegroup.
Let’s create a Homegroup. And now we get the option to determine what I would like to share. Would I’d like to share my pictures, my music, my videos, my documents, or my printers? These are the different libraries available inside of Windows 7. We’ll see that the moment when we look at our Windows Explorer.
I’m going to choose to share everything, and click Next. It’s now going to think a little bit about the sharing process, and then it’s going to tell me a password that will be used for all of the devices that are on my Homegroup.
So all have to do is write down that password, print out the password, hand it around to everybody in my home, and now they’d be able to access this Homegroup and be part of everybody sharing those resources inside of my house.
I’m on another Windows 7 that’s inside of my house, and if we look at Windows Explorer, we can see there is nothing under the Homegroup option. I can go to the Control Panel and start the Homegroup option, or I could simply click on that Homegroup from there. But I’ll go to control Panel so you can see the entire view.
When we visit the Homegroup option, you’ll notice that it tells me that there is already a Homegroup on the network. It’s from that other device that we were using. And we can learn about Homegroups, we can change what we’re sharing, or we can simply join now. And we can decide what we would like to share. If we don’t want to share anything, we can simply deselect those, or we can choose the defaults.
Now we need that password from that other device. So I have to carefully type the password that is on that. And if I get it right and click Next, it will join the Homegroup and now I can access the resources on all of the other systems that are sharing on that same Homegroup. Let’s have a look to see what that might be.
I’m going to move back to my Windows Explorer. Notice under Homegroup, there’s now a device inside of that, and I can see all of the libraries that are being shared from that computer. I can move into a pictures library and view some of the pictures that are on that computer. Notice how easy that was, once I set up be sharing. I didn’t have to set any passwords, I didn’t have to define any user accounts, I didn’t have to specify any particular rights and permissions.
I simply went into the Homegroup, chose the sharing options that I would like, share the password, and you’re done. It’s a very, very easy way to share resources across all of the different devices in your home.