Do you need a home network for school?

(Outdoors 2 image by Steve Woods, Royalty Free)

With the government slowly rolling out laptops to school kids, many families will discover they have more than one computer in the home.

A home network can ease a few things for households with multiple computers — you can share an internet connection so the kids have access to needed resources, share files between computers, you could set up a NAS so you can store and backup files and make them accessible by everyone, or even play multiplayer games across the network when the kids need some downtime.

If you've recently acquired a second, or even third computer, then networking is something you may like to look in to. CNET.com.au has a range of networking guides available that can walk you through some of the steps in building your own home network.

• Wireless network buying guide
• How to build a wireless network
• Fast fixes for 10 common Wi-Fi problems
• How to find out who's using your wireless
• Set up wireless file and printer sharing
• File sharing between XP, Vista and OS X on a local network
• Top NAS units

You may also want to protect your kids from some of the bigger nasties online by investing in one of the internet security suites below:

• Panda Internet Security 2009
• Kaspersky Internet Security
• McAfee Internet Security 2009
• Norton Internet Security 2009
• Trend Micro Internet Security 2009
• ZoneAlarm Internet Security 2009
• AVG Internet Security 8.0