- Accessing Shared Network Resources
- Mapping a Network Folder to a Local Drive Letter
- Creating a Network Location for a Remote Folder
- Accessing a Shared Printer
- Sharing Resources with the Network
- From Here
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Creating a Network Location for a Remote Folder
When you map a network folder to a drive on your computer, Vista creates an icon for the mapped drive in the Computer folder's Network Locations group. However, you may find that the supply of available drive letters is getting low if your computer has multiple hard drives, multiple CD or DVD drives, a memory card reader, a flash drive or two, and so on.
To work around this problem, you can add your own icons to the Computer folder's Network Locations group. These icons are called, appropriately enough, network locations, and each one is associated with a particular network folder. (They're similar to the network places you could create in Windows XP.) That is, after you create a network location, you can access the network folder associated with that location by double-clicking the icon. This is usually a lot faster than drilling down through several layers of folders on the network computer, so create network locations for those network folders you access most often.
Follow these steps to create a network location:
- Select Start, Computer to open the Computer folder.
- Right-click an empty section of the Computer folder, and then click Add a Network Location. Vista launches the Add Network Location Wizard.
- Click Next in the initial wizard dialog box.
- Select Choose a Custom Network Location, and then click Next.
- Type the network address of the folder you want to work with. Notice that as you enter the address, the Add Network Location Wizard displays a list of objects that match what you've typed; so, you can save some typing by selecting items from the lists as they appear (see Figure 8.8). You can also click Browse to use the Browse for Folder dialog box to select the network folder.
Figure 8.8 As you enter the network address, the Add Network Location Wizard displays a list of objects that match what you've typed.
- Click Next.
- Type a name for the network location and click Next.
- Click Finish. The Add Network Location Wizard adds an icon for the network folder to the Computer window, as shown in Figure 8.9.
Figure 8.9 After you associate a network folder with a network location, an icon for the new location appears in the Computer window.
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