Introducing Vista’s Network Center

Introducing Vista’s Network Center

If you have ever worked as a consultant or even just helped out a friend with a computer problem, then you have probably been in a situation in which you sat down at an unfamiliar workstation and had to get an idea of how the system was configured prior to working on the problem. Although Windows XP’s network configuration options are pretty straightforward, you usually can’t get all of the particulars of a machine’s network connectivity at a glance. In Windows Vista though, Microsoft has made it a lot easier to quickly gather information about how a workstation is connected to a network through a new component called the Network Center. In this article I will show you what the Network Center is and how it may eventually make your life easier.

Before I Begin

Before I get started, I just need to mention that I am writing this article in February of 2006. Vista is not slated to be released for several more months. As such, everything that I will be showing you is from the Vista beta. Anything in this article could potentially change by the time that Vista ships, although I do not anticipate any significant changes related to the Network Center.

The Network

If you’ve been working with Windows for a long time, you probably remember the Network Neighborhood from Windows 95. The Network Neighborhood eventually evolved into My Network Places. Vista changes the name once again. The new name is simply Network. The Network option is available directly from Vista’s Start menu.
The interesting thing about the Network option is that it behaves a lot more like the old Windows 95 Network Neighborhood than Windows XP’s My Network Places. When you click on the Network option, Vista displays all of the computers within the current domain, as shown in Figure A. You can then double click on any one of the computers to access shared resources residing on it.