Contents at a Glance Chapter 1: Networking with Other Machines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .475 Dissecting Network Components 476 Hello, Operator? Modem Madness 481 Chapter 2: Managing a Windows Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .491 Speaking of Networking 491 Networking Soft(ware)ly 492 Identifying Computers to Each Other 494 Visiting Windows Vista Network Center 497 Joining a Workgroup 501 Your Laptop’s Name and Address, Mac 502 Playing Nice, Sharing a Folder 506 Accessing Another Computer on a Local Network 510 Mapping a Folder 512 Sharing Devices and Internet Connections 514 Automated Network Diagnostics 519 Chapter 3: Going Wireless . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .521 Doing What with a Wireless Network? 522 Seeing Hot Spots 524 Working a WiFi Network 527 Does Your Laptop Do WiFi? 531 Disabling the Original WiFi Adapter 532 Building a Wireless Network 533 Setting up a Wireless Network in Windows 541 Cutting the Wires Other Ways 550 Chapter 4: Spinning the Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .555 Cruising the Web 555 Discerning the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Internet 557 Getting on the Internet 558 Finding Your Way on the Web 561 Taking Internet Explorer 7 Shortcuts 580 Chapter 5: Exchanging E-mail, IMs, and Newsgroups . . . . . . . . . . . .587 Fielding Microsoft’s Triple Play 588 Using Windows Mail or Outlook Express 592 Feeling Safe with Windows Mail and Windows Live Security 604 Windows Mail and Windows Live Enhancements 609 Minding Your E-mail Manners 618 Snagging Web-based E-mail Programs 620 Letting Your Fingers Do IMing 621 Chapter 6: Communicating with VoIP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .625 Rocking the Laptop Telephony 626 Cutting the Cord 627 Getting to VoIP at Home or Work 631 Getting Quality VoIP 633 Equipping a Laptop for VoIP 635 38 140925-pp08.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 474 Chapter 1: Networking with Other Machines In This Chapter ߜ Catching up the laptop with the network ߜ Going into the Ethernet ߜ Linking your modem to you M ainframe and then desktop computers were at first isolated boxes of processors and data. Then they became linked to each other through a local area network (LAN) and to the rest of the world through the Internet. When the first laptop computers became popular, they followed pretty much the same path. At first, the idea was that a laptop was something that could be used between offices. I worked with some of the very first portable PCs, lugging them onto commuter trains and airplanes and then using a serial cable to connect to a desktop machine or copying my completed work onto floppy disks to transfer the data. It wasn’t long, though, before desktops and laptops turned to the telephone to make the connection. Specialized mail services like MCI Mail allowed you to send messages or files to a central computer where they waited for the recipient to sign on and retrieve them . . . over a painfully slow dial-up con- nection where speeds were sometimes measured in minutes per page. For years, laptops worked with external dial-up modems the size of a paper- back book; eventually designers found a way to shrink the components of the modem so they could be integrated into the case. A little further along in the development process of the laptop, designers added a network inter- face card (NIC), which brought the Ethernet into the machine. In this chapter I examine the hardware and software components neces- sary to allow a laptop to join a LAN. You stick to wired technology here; in Book VIII, Chapter 3, I discuss the next step in network evolution, wireless communication. 39 140925-bk08ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:51 PM Page 475 Dissecting Network Components 476 Dissecting Network Components A laptop that lives all by itself is, at heart, no different than a machine that is connected to a network. Within its case is a microprocessor, memory, stor- age, and input and output components including a keyboard, a pointing device, a display, and connections for use with printers and other external hardware. Now, to become part of a network you must add three more essential elements: ✦ A network interface card (NIC). Greatly simplified in its modern incar- nation, this is a small set of chips that manages the bundling of packets of data or commands to be sent out on the network and the reception and unbundling of packets addressed to it from other devices. Nearly all current laptops now come equipped with an Ethernet port that serves this purpose; it accepts a cable with an oversized version of the familiar telephone connector. If your laptop does not have an Ethernet port, or if the built-in circuitry is outdated or fails, it can be replaced by a NIC that plugs into a PC Card or ExpressCard slot, or attaches to the laptop through a USB port. ✦ A set of wires that links two or more computers and other devices together. In nearly all designs for LANs, the wires don’t go directly from one computer to another, but instead go through a device located (in logical terms) as if it were the hub of a wheel. This router accepts incoming data from any device linked to it and then re-routes it to the proper destination — another computer, a printer, a shared modem, or other devices. In a wireless or WiFi system, the laptop broadcasts its signal to a wire- less router that retransmits the information to the proper destination. The principles are the same as for a wired system . . . except for the lack of wires. ✦ A software protocol and network management system. Today, network- ing is built into all current versions of the Windows operating system. Taking a quick trip into the ether(net) The vast majority of LANs are today based around the Ethernet specifica- tion; you’re not required to use it, but you’d have to go well out of your way to set up a network that employs different conventions. (You can also buy a keyboard that doesn’t have QWERTYUIOP as its top row of characters, and you can use Linux instead of Windows.) But for most of us, there is no need to buck a well-proven trend. Ethernet performs pretty well and our goal is get our work accomplished, not to prove a point by being the odd one out. 39 140925-bk08ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:51 PM Page 476 Book VIII Chapter 1 Networking with Other Machines Dissecting Network Components 477 The core of Ethernet is a set of definitions of hardware and software proto- cols that encase chunks of data within a packet that includes the sender’s and receiver’s address, as well as other necessary information for communi- cation between machines that aren’t directly connected to each other. Today, laptop users typically use one of three Ethernet flavors which differ principally in their velocity. ✦ 1000BASE-T also known as Gigabit Ethernet. The current speed champion gives you the basic information you seek right in its name: it’s theoreti- cally capable of moving as much as a gigabit, or 1,000 megabits of data per second. ✦ 100BASE-TX. Also in common use and runs at speeds as fast as 100 Mbps. ✦ 10BASE-T. Older systems may offer this, which operates no faster than 10 Mbps. Note that an Ethernet is only capable of working at the speed of the slowest component in a particular connection. For example, if you have 1000Base-T NICs but a 100Base-TX router or hub, the network will move data no faster than 100 Mbps. If you have a 100Base-TX router that connects to a 10Base-T NIC in a computer on the network, you’re limited to that slower speed. The cable that runs between the Ethernet port on your laptop and a router or other device is a heavy-duty, higher-capacity version of a telephone wire. As various versions of the standard have been introduced, the cable has gotten a bit more robust; today the best cables are called Category 5e, which is a slight improvement over (and in most cases interchangeable with) Category 5. At each end of the cable is something called by designers an 8P8C modular connector; the name means “eight position, eight connector.” (The connector is also commonly but incorrectly referred to as an RJ45 plug; a distinction without a difference for most users.) Thus far I’ve written only about how an Ethernet is wired. Now consider — briefly and simply — how it works. The first thing to understand is that data isn’t sent as a continuous stream from one location to another; if the system worked that way, in one example it would require opening a channel between my office and Paris anytime I wanted to send an order for fresh brioche. Instead, data is cut up into little snippets that are like envelopes with a sender’s address and a recipient’s address on each end. The hardware side of the Ethernet interface inserts each packet into the extremely fast stream of data that moves by on the electronic superhighway; the computer watches the traffic and looks for a gap large enough to merge into traffic. If somehow two or more devices try to fill the same gap, there will be a collision, but the computer senses this and simply re-sends the data. 39 140925-bk08ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:51 PM Page 477 Dissecting Network Components 478 At the router, the electronics in that box scan the intended address for each packet and checks it against a list it maintains for every attached computer on the network. When it finds something intended for one of its clients, it redirects the packet to its destination. Something about spokes Early in this book I explain that a computer accomplishes its magic not because it’s smart, but because it’s extremely fast. The same applies to the physical design (the topology) of a network. It doesn’t really matter if the cable connecting the laptop that sits on the left wing of my desk to the desktop on right side goes 6 feet in a straight line or if it goes down through the floor to a router in the basement and comes up in a hole on the other side of the room and passes through three other machines before arriving at its destination. Unless you’re talking about links that travel hundreds of miles, delays caused by cable length are measured in fractions of thousandths of a second. Most simple networks — including virtually every wired and wireless system in the home and small office — use a design called hub-and-spoke, also known as a star topology. This sort of network is centered around a hub, switch, router, or (in a very large or complex system) server. The path from one com- puter to another passes through the central device. This sort of design offers advantages: ✦ Some protection. The failure of any spoke — whether it’s a NIC in a com- puter, the computer itself, or a networked device such as a printer or broadband modem — doesn’t bring down the entire network. ✦ Some workaround. And if the hub — a router, switch, or server — fails, the network goes down, the individual computers can continue to do their work albeit without connection to each other. A bit about buses A less commonly used form of network uses a bus topology: Each machine is connected to a peer machine to its (logically speaking) left or right. At each end of the bus, a terminator loops the signal back the other direction. The bus must remain unbroken from one end to the other (with all the machines turned on and NICs performing properly); the network won’t work if ✦ The cable is damaged ✦ A connector comes undone ✦ A network interface fails 39 140925-bk08ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:51 PM Page 478 Book VIII Chapter 1 Networking with Other Machines Dissecting Network Components 479 Running in rings A ring topology is a closed system; all the members of a network are arranged in something approximating a circle and the wiring goes from one machine to the next, all the way around, until it completes the circuit. All the components — cables, connectors, and interfaces — must be working properly for the network to operate. (You may be old enough to remember Christmas tree light sets that were electrified with serial wiring; the failure of one lamp shut down the entire string.) Hubs, switches, and routers A hub doesn’t have to sit at the exact center of a circle, like a real hub on a bicycle wheel. But it’s situated that way in logical terms. Let me explain that by painting a word picture of my real office: ✦ At the moment, I’m sitting at the keyboard of my main production computer. ✦ A short Ethernet cable runs from that computer, along the floor, to an eight-port router on a shelf in the corner. ✦ The eighth port on the router goes to a two-foot Ethernet wire that connects to a broadband cable modem that allows every machine in my network to connect to the Internet at high speed. ✦ To my left are two laptops; one connects by a short Ethernet cable to the hub and the other uses its built-in WiFi circuitry to make a wireless connection to the network. ✦ Around to my right is another desk with a computer, and that machine plugs into a wall jack that connects about 15 feet down into the base- ment and back up again out through an outlet and from there into the same eight-port hub. Broadening your horizons What do I mean by broadband? In technical terms it means that the delivery mechanism can bring a wide frequency of signals. Wider or broader is better than narrower (like dial-up over an old-style phone system). If it helps you to visualize, think of broadband as a big, fat pipe full of many different varieties of stuff moving at high speed; that’s got to be better than a thin straw that takes a long time to transport a small amount of just one flavor. 39 140925-bk08ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:51 PM Page 479 Dissecting Network Components 480 ✦ All the way over on the opposite end of the office is another computer that I use to manage an archive of photos and old files; it connects by cabling that goes down into the basement and over to the hub, traveling about 30 feet. ✦ Another cable coming out of the hub connects through the wall to my left. ✦ In the room there, the cable goes into a WiFi router that broadcasts a signal throughout my home and office, allowing me to take a laptop out on the deck on a sunny day or into the family room if I want to play some streaming video or audio there. ✦ Finally, the WiFi router has four wired ports of its own, one of which is connected to a cable that stretches about 15 feet to a machine in the study. ✦ The eighth port on the router goes to a tw2-foot Ethernet wire that con- nects to a broadband cable modem that allows any and every machine in my network to connect to the Internet at high speed. In no way does this design resemble a circle. And none of the cables are the same length, so the spokes are all irregular. But if I wiped clean the image of this complex network and just think in terms of how all the devices (including a few I left out in an attempt to make this a bit easier to visualize) connect to each other through the router, what you’ve got here is a hub-and-spoke network. Smarter than a hub The original design for a hub was for a dumb device that merely brought everything together and then allowed signals to pass back out to every attached device on the network; if the packet wasn’t intended for a particular com- puter, it ignored the information. We’ve gone way past that concept by now. Hubs were first replaced by intelligent switches, and now switches have been mostly supplanted by routers. A switch improved on a hub by adding some intelligence to read the address of an incoming packet and then selecting a path to send it directly to the intended recipient. Going directly allows every machine that is part of the network to use the full bandwidth of the network and also improved its efficiency by reducing the opportunity for collisions between packets. A router, also called a gateway, adds one more very important element to the network switch: the ability to allow an entire network to also share a single broadband modem for Internet access. (The delivery system for the modem can be cable, DSL, fiber optics, or a dedicated high-speed telephone connection.) Another way to look at a router is to think of it as a device that serves as a LAN hub at the same time it connects to the outside world (or to another network) through a gateway. 39 140925-bk08ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:51 PM Page 480 Book VIII Chapter 1 Networking with Other Machines Hello, Operator? Modem Madness 481 Hello, Operator? Modem Madness The purpose of a modem is to translate the digital 0s and 1s that exist within a laptop into an analog electrical wave that can travel over a telephone wire. The word modem is a concatenation of modulator-demodulator. Today very few of us still use a standard telephone modem, but the same prin- ciple applies to users of much faster DSL and cable modems. And the concept of a modem has been applied to other forms of communications we now com- monly use: wireless networks, cell phones, and fiber-optic networks. Types of modems In this section I talk about the four most common direct-connection modems: ✦ Dial-up telephone modems ✦ Cable modems ✦ DSL phone line modems ✦ Fiber-optic translators Today, cable and DSL modems are the most commonly used in homes and office. Fiber-optic system (including Verizon’s proprietary FIOS service) use is growing in regions where they’re offered, while old-style dial-up telephone modems are fading away rapidly. Smooth modulater In most of the modern world, the telephone wires that come into your home and office are little different from the system designed by Bell in the 1870s. They’re a simple pair of copper wires — one (usually covered in green insula- tion) is an electrical common or ground, and the other (usually red) carries 6 to 12 volts of DC power. When you speak into the microphone end of a telephone, your voice modulates the current into a varying wave. At the other end of a simple point-to-point circuit, a telephone receives that modulated signal and uses it to make sounds in a speaker held up to a human ear. The wave is called an analog signal. Think of it as an analogy of the sound: The pitch and volume of the human voice are represented by the peaks and valleys, and the distance between them by an electrical wave. As I discuss in Book VIII, Chapter 6 about Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), the basic tele- phone systems become much more complex once they include the ability to call any phone anywhere rather than just connect directly between two points. But for your purposes here, imagine all connections are direct. 39 140925-bk08ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:51 PM Page 481 Hello, Operator? Modem Madness 482 Dial-up telephone modems The first modem I worked with, in a wire service newsroom, was a box of wires and flashing lights that could move the news to a teletype machine at about 75 bits per second (bps); that’s the rough equivalent of about 8 char- acters per second or 100 words per minute. Transmitting just the words (without the photographs, illustrations, and clever cartoons) in the book you’re holding in your hands might take nearly 20 hours. Things were looking a bit more promising when the first telephone modems for personal computer were introduced, quadrupling the speed all the way up to 300 bps. To send identifiable characters, one behind the other, over a serial communi- cation cable like a telephone wire, the computer has to add coding to mark the beginning and end of 8-bit computer words or bytes. It also inserts other data to help with error checking or error correction. Therefore, the net throughput of a 300 bps modem might be equivalent to about 27 bytes per second. If modems hadn’t advanced beyond that point, the World Wide Web would never have been possible. Now, the big question: Why am I bothering to discuss this ancient and slow technology? Good question; if you have a choice of any of the other, faster means of communication, use them. The first few generations of laptop computers didn’t come with an internal modem. There were two good reasons for this: ✦ Not everyone wanted one. ✦ The pace of change in modems was so great that it made little sense to put one inside the box. It made more sense to ask users to buy the latest portable modem and attach it to a serial port or later to a USB port. And then in recent years, modems became so small that they were built into the motherboard of nearly all laptops. Many users may not even know they have one inside the box; look for a port on the side of the box for connecting a telephone cable. The connector for a telephone wire looks very similar to the one for an Ethernet cable, except the phone device is smaller. Don’t try to force the wrong connector into the improper port; it’s hard to do, but some people try. See Figure 1-1. The best speed you can realistically expect with a dial-up modem is some- where in the range of about 42K; there are simply too many places where a good signal can go bad on the old telephone system. 39 140925-bk08ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:51 PM Page 482 Book VIII Chapter 1 Networking with Other Machines Hello, Operator? Modem Madness 483 The only real advantage to holding on to this old technology is that maybe somewhere, someplace you bring your laptop is beyond the reach of broad- band or wireless communication. But almost everywhere you’ll find a telephone. For that reason I maintain an account with AOL, one of the last of the remaining Internet service providers (ISPs) that maintains dial-up modem service in locations across the United States and in many nations around the world. (AOL also allows for near-instant connection over a broadband link.) Cable modems From the same people who bring you “The Three Stooges” marathons and reality shows even sillier and less believable than Moe, Larry, and Curly comes the high-speed, generally reliable cable modem link. Cable modems use the same large coaxial wiring that brings television into your home or office; the cable is broad enough to carry hundreds of video signals as well as Internet. It does this by sending multiple signals at different frequencies on the same wire; the Internet is given a chunk of the spectrum for downloading to your computer and uploading from it. In most cable Internet systems, the signals travel as an analog wave. The cable modem modulates the digital information in your computer to send it upstream, or demodulates an incoming analog wave to convert it to digital for use in your computer. An example of a current cable modem is in Figure 1-2. Cable upsides: ✦ The Internet is constantly available to your computer (as with other broadband technologies such as DSL and fiber-optic systems). You don’t have to dial a number; it’s like electricity in your wall outlet, ready when you need it. ✦ You can easily add a router or gateway between the cable modem and your computer to link several laptops or desktops to the same Internet connection (as this chapter explores earlier). Figure 1-1: A port for a built-in dial- up modem on the side of a current laptop. 39 140925-bk08ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:51 PM Page 483 . a serial cable to connect to a desktop machine or copying my completed work onto floppy disks to transfer the data. It wasn’t long, though, before desktops and laptops turned to the telephone to. motherboard of nearly all laptops. Many users may not even know they have one inside the box; look for a port on the side of the box for connecting a telephone cable. The connector for a telephone wire. to a wire- less router that retransmits the information to the proper destination. The principles are the same as for a wired system . . . except for the lack of wires. ✦ A software protocol and