How to Share CD & DVD Drives Over the Network on Windows

From ultrabooks to netbooks, computers are shedding their optical drives. If you still use an occasional CD or DVD, you don’t have to buy an external optical drive –  you can share another computer’s optical drive over the network.

The two computers must be on the same local network to share an optical drive. This requires using the Advanced Sharing settings in Windows – there’s no easy, HomeGroup-style way of doing this.

Sharing a Drive

First, open the Computer window (click Start and select Computer) on the computer with the optical drive.

Right-click the drive you want to share, point to Share with and select Advanced Sharing

Click the Advanced Sharing button in the properties window that appears.

In the next window, enable the Share this folder checkbox. Type a descriptive name – such as “CD Drive” – for the share, and then click the Permissions button.

Ensure that the Everyone group has Read access to the drive. If you require additional security – for example, if you’re not using a home network — you can restrict access to specific users. Click OK to save your changes after configuring the permissions.

You may want to disable password-protected sharing to make this easier, assuming you’re on a secure home network. To do so, click the Network and Sharing Center link under Password Protection.

Click the Home or Work header, scroll down, and select Turn off password protected sharing to disable it. Click the Save changes button after you’re done.

After you click the OK button, your drive will be shared on the network. You’ll see its address under Network Path in the properties window.

An icon over the drive indicates that it’s shared. To stop sharing the drive later, go back into its Advanced Sharing window and uncheck the Share this folder checkbox.

Mapping a Drive

On your other computer, open Windows Explorer and click the Network option to view your network.

Browse to the share you created, then right-click it and select Map network drive.

You can specify a drive letter for the shared optical drive and have it automatically become mapped each time you log in.

The mapped drive will appear as its own drive letter in the My Computer window. Double-click the drive, or navigate to it in any application, to access its contents over the network.

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We’ve also covered using Paragon Net Burner, a third-party program, to share disc drives over the network.

MK802: NEW USB THUMB DRIVE-SIZED ANDROID COMPUTER

The mini computer ships with Android 4.0 ICS and just like Cotton Candy, it comes with microUSB and microSD slots as well as WiFi. MK802 also has a full-sized USB port and of course, there's also a HDMI port.

The price is larger than for the Raspberry Pi: $74 (including shipping), but the new mini PC has better hardware. And it's a lot cheaper than Cotton Candy, which does have a dual-core CPU and 1GB of RAM, but it costs $199 plus shipping and further more, the pre-orders have been closed for now.

MK802 can be purchased via aliexpress.com (US $74.0)

How to Change Your IP Address Using PowerShell

We have already shown you how you can change your IP address from the command prompt, which required long netsh commands, now we are doing the same thing in PowerShell, without the complexity.

Note: The following commands are new in PowerShell v3 and therefore require Windows 8, they also require an administrative command prompt.

Editors Note: This article is probably for our more geeky audience and requires some basic knowledge of IP Addressing and CIDR notation

Changing Your IP Address

We have seen people pulling out their hair trying to change their IP addresses using cryptic WMI classes in older versions of PowerShell, but that changed with PowerShell v3, there is now a NetTCPIP module that brings most of the functionality to native PowerShell. While a bit confusing at first, mostly due to the lack of documentation at the moment, it starts to make sense once the geeks shows you how its done.

Changing an IP Address can be done using the New-NetIPAddress cmdlet, it has a lot of parameters, some of which, are not even documented in Get-Help. So here it is:

New-NetIPAddress –InterfaceAlias “Wired Ethernet Connection” –IPv4Address “192.168.0.1” –PrefixLength 24 -DefaultGateway 192.168.0.254

This assumes the following:

• The name of the interface you want to change the IP address  for is Local Area Network
• You want to statically assign an IP address of 192.168.0.1
• You want to set a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 (which is /24 in CIDR notation)
• You want to set a default gateway of 192.168.0.254

You would obviously switch the settings out for some that match the addressing criteria for your network.

Setting Your DNS Information

Now here comes another tricky part, it turns out that there is a whole separate module called DNSClient that you have to use to manipulate your DNS Settings. To change your DNS Server you would use:

Set-DnsClientServerAddress -InterfaceAlias “Wired Ethernet Connection” -ServerAddresses 192.168.0.1, 192.168.0.2

This assumes that you want to set the primary DNS server for Wired Ethernet Connection to 192.168.0.1 and the secondary DNS server to 192.168.0.2. That’s all there is to it.