Thread: Networking Made Easier

The networking features in Windows 7 address several problems that arise from the use of corporate pes on noncorporate networks, particularly by employees who take laptops home after work and on weekends. If you've ever tried printing on a networked home printer from a laptop assDciated with a corporate domain, you'll appreciate the Windows 7-given ability to associate your laptop with a so-called Home Group for easy access to printers and files on other computers-without any tinkering with your IT department's carefully applied domain configuration settings. The HomeGroup feature has also been designed to prevent other PCs on your home network from accessing any of the (potentially sensitive) corporate data on ypur laptop.

Unfortunately, many potential Home¬Group users may have to wait to realize its benefits: You need a Windows 7 PC to create a HomeGroup for a Windows 7 laptop to join, and it's unlikely that many people will be migrating all the systems they use at once.
But Microsoft offers additional enticements for those who do. Windows 7 will be smart enough to recognize when you are at home and when you are at your office. As a result, when you print a document, the OS will choose the appropriate printer for the job. And a new "federated" search capability will let you sift through files on PCs across the network and apply filters to your results. This means that you can do a keyword search and then refine its results by specifying a particular file type.

Windows 7 promises easier Wi-Fi network and Bluetooth peripheral setup, too, though we weren't able to test either capability on the pre-beta software we used. Hovering over the taskbar icon for the network adapters produces a jump list of available networks (or devices, in the case of Bluetooth); then you merely click the one you want to connect to (or pair with, in the case ~f a Bluetooth peripheral).

Another addition is wake-on-wireless-LAN, the ability to bring a Wi-Fi-connected PC out of sleep mode remotely Gust as you've been able to do with ethernet-connected systems). Other networking improvements apply if your company installs Windows Server 2008 R2 (and your IT department allows them). For example, you might be able to click a link in a corporate e-mail message to launch an application behind the firewall-without having to make a VPN connection first (Windows 7 will transparently handle the security arrangements)