When you have an operating system with as many features in it that Windows 7 has, there is a lot that you have to look over. You have to make sure that your decisions allow you to keep certain components of the system safe from being compromised. This attention to security also has to be paid to your home network as well. You have to be sure that you are able to keep all of the threats that you possibly can, out of your system. So we have put together a couple of tools that will allow you to keep your home network safe and as an extension, your personal computer as well. When it comes to the threats to your network, you have to worry about both the internet and the physical threats that can happen. Most people only worry about the threats that come from the internet. They never think about the threats that can come from your next door neighbor.

Some of the tools that we mention may be overkill for a small network but they will help keep you and your network safe. Other tools that we mention are easy to use and made for normal consumer usage. We do not expect you to use every tool that is at your disposal to protect your home network but we want to let you know that the option is available just in case you need it.

One of the tools that you can use to keep your network safe is a tool called NMap. It is a free piece of software that you can find on the internet. This tool will scan your network and tell you what computers are connected to it. This can help expose if someone is connected to your network that should not be. You can also use the tool to help expose any weakness in your network. It will show you open ports that are vulnerable to someone being able to get into your network. Seeing which ports are open on your system will allow you to be proactive against any threats before they happen.

Another tool that you can use to help protect your home network is the firewall that already comes with your router. Most people will plug the router in and never mess with it again. If you actually explore all of the options that are available, you will find that it has a whole suite of applications that will be able to keep your network safe. It is up to you to actually turn these features on. On the newer routers, the firewall is turned on automatically. But it still may not be optimized to best protect your network. Read your manual and see what you will need to do to make sure that the router is using all of its abilities.

When you are alone on your computer at night, surfing the internet, you will sometimes have a tendency to believe that being on the computer will make you totally isolated. As if no one in the world, would be able to violate the inner sanctity of your computer. But unfortunately, this is not true. When we use our computers on the internet, there are many ways that people are able to access all of our inner thoughts that we put down in digital format. Even though we may believe that our data will always be secured, it can only be that way if we work at it. When most people think about their security being violated on the computer, they mostly think about black hat hackers coming through the line remotely from another part of the world. But this not always the case. A large percentages of security breakdowns in a wireless network, happen when the perpetrator is only a few yards away from the actual network. So how can we stop this from happening. How can we keep people from accessing the network with our explicit permission. In this article, we will give you a few ways that will allow you to keep your network secured.

In Windows 7, the network security features have been made to be more effective. If you go into your control panel, you will see a wide overview on the different states of your home network. You can check the network that you are connected to and you can also create homegroups. Homegroups are a specific settings that will allow you to decide such matters as who gets to share certain data items on your computer. If the visiting computer on the network is not part of the homegroup, it is not allowed to access that part of your computer. This a good first step, but will only keep parts of your network safe. To really be sure that you are secured, we must take a look at the router.

There are a few steps that you must take with the router, so that you are sure that no one can access your network without you knowing. The first thing that you have to do, is to make sure that you change the username and password that gives you access to the router. Make sure that they are not on the default setting that they were in when you bought the router from the store. After you have done that, make sure that you have an encryption layer set up for the router. You can use WEP, WPA. or WPA II. We recommend WPA II, since it is the upgraded version of the most secured network encryption out there. Now after you set the encryption layer up, if anyone want to get on your network, they have know the password that you set up. But that might not be secured enough for your taste. You can also go in the router and set it so that someone has to have a particular MAC address to get on the network. MAC addresses are the unique number that is on your network card. Every device that connects to the internet has one. They can be spoofed, but someone would have to know your network card to be able to get the right number that will allow them on your network.

So as you can see, there are several levels of home network security that you can set up. Make sure that you do, so that you can truly surf the web secured.