Once you've set up a home network, the whole household can browse the Web from two, three or more computers at the same time. While you're checking gardening sites, the kids can be listening to Savage Garden on an Internet jukebox.

This feature of Windows 98 Second Edition is called Internet Connection Sharing (ICS), and is designed to work over any type of network you set up in your home. You can share the lightning speed of your cable or DSL connection, as well as regular dial-up modems.

If you use an ISP (Internet Service Provider), you can make do with just one account even though mutiple computers will be browsing at one time.

How can one Internet connection simultaneously serve two or more computers? Normally, any computer seeking to get on the Internet must have an IP address. ICS gets around that by having one computer handle all the connections and then process the Internet requests from each connected machine. The computer acting as the main machine, or host, issues each of the connected computers an IP address but that address is only for use within the home network. When the host computer goes out to the Internet, it uses just the one IP address, its own.

Remember that in order for Internet Connection Sharing to function, you'll need the necessary hardware adapters to create a network at home.

Now that you know about sharing an Internet connection, find out how to share a printer and files.