Not long ago, it was considered a luxury for the average American household to have one computer. Computers were prohibitively expensive back then and only the upper middle class families could afford them. Several years later, the cost of manufacturing a computer would go down. This led to a greater percentage of households having a computer in them. A good portion of these homes can have more than one computer. It can be a pain to transfer files between the computers physically, so most homes have installed local networks in them. With the release of Windows 7, this process has become easier than ever. What was once the domain of the computer geeks is now accessible to the average computer user.

Now that Windows 7 has made it easier than ever to set up your own private home network, there is still the problem of keeping that network secured. Most people realize what a network does in theory, but they do not realize how not having the proper security protocols in order, can lead them to be penetrated by an outside attacker . There are a couple steps that a user can do to prevent this from happening.

The first step that you must do, is to make sure that you have a proper password for logging into your router. There are too many people out there that would like to be able to access your network the easy way, by guessing your password. If you make the password a non dictionary word mixed with numbers, that becomes considerably harder task to accomplish. So make sure that you have thought out a password that will be hard to guess. Some people even leave the default password that comes with the router. That is a big No, No. That password is available to anyone on the Internet and will  leave you extremely vulnerable.

The second thing that you will want to do, is make sure that you pick the right type of encryption for your network. There are several encryption methods available for your network, including WEP, and several forms of WPA, WPA 1 and WPA 2. The best one to pick is WPA 2. It is an improved version of WPA which was already proven to be very effective. WEP, while better than nothing, has proven to be very insecure and should not be chosen unless you really have to.

The last step that you should take to ensure that your network is safe is to choose a good software firewall. Your router should already come with a built in firewall that you can configure but it will double your safety to have a software version as well. This will make sure that just in case someone infiltrates your network security, that they can not get into your computer as well. You can download several highly regarded free firewall software on the Internet. Choose from a reputable company that you have confidence in.

These are a few ways that you can make sure that you keep your Windows 7 network secured. If you follow these steps there should be very little that you will have to worry about.