Chas - My experience was that getting to the point of reliable music streaming over my home network involved a lot of head scratching, trial and error, and many false starts. A lot of DIY, "figure it out yourself" time. I did it, my approach is rock solid and it's easy for the family to use. But It took time and effort. Short of your doing that, I have two suggestions for a short cut: 1) As before, put your music on some form of USB storage that you connect to your TV, Sony media thing, or whatever. 2) Buy an Apple Airport Express and use Itunes as the software. In the link below, see the section described as "exclusively for Itunes music". Connect the Airport express output to a stereo system or powered speakers and you're done. Or, buy third-party Air Play enabled speakers. Either way, good luck and keep us all posted on how it goes. pkponder - I find the homegroup approach needlessly complicated compared to how it used to work. Data throughput (Mbps) for moving files, backup, etc, is slower than before too. Here is a link that might be useful: Apple info

"As soon as Windows 7 is installed, it creates a default HomeGroup. If it detects an existing HomeGroup, you will be given the opportunity to join, but you will need the password. For home and small business users, HomeGroup is an excellent tool, but there is a problem. HomeGroup only works when all other machines on the network have Windows 7 installed, which in the short term, may not be the case. There will be many situations where the network has XP or Vista machines as part of the network, in addition to Windows 7. So, how is it possible to get them all to work together?" See link above.

pk, yes, frustrated is an understatement. Don't like spending so much time on such things that are probably easy. Did a lot of research with no resolve. Printer is hooked up to a desktop; DT hooked up to router. I don't "think" the printer is connected directly to router. Not sure what ethernet is. Laptop works wirelessly to the printer. Laptop is 8 mos old. Was working perfectly fine with printer until this new router was installed the other day. I have not tried plugging the printer directly to laptop. I'll try that in the morning. Brain is fried right now so I'll continue on this quest in the morning since I need the printer for work. Thanks for the help. Wonder if uninstalling the computer software from laptop, then reinstalling it again, will work.

Gee, I sorry if I was feeling "too good" about my purchase. But, I say if you haven't put your hands on one your experience with his machine is less than mine. At least you have spared me from someone buying one of these because "Jerry said" is worth $400. My reference to that number is what I recall reading in the add, recalling how much these machines costs just a couple of years ago. This machine came without any reference to Windows 8, has the good old fashioned glossy documentation makes me think it was "designed for" sale in a higher priced market.. If one has a home network and want to share a printer, they might be happier (at an additional cost of at least $50) if the printer is accessed off of Ethernet or WiFi. On the W8, I moved forward first on my W8 notebook to access that printer. With the great help from this site I used the information to set the printer as "shared" on the XP host computer. I then followed the directions to use the W8 Control Panel to open the network (hey, this was all looking familiar) and bingo there I found my XP machine and thus the Printer. I doubled clicked the Canon printer and W8 started to look for a driver.... I'll estimate 3 or 4 minutes later I got a failure to find a driver. The next step upon this type failure indicated to try to install the printer in W8 (W7 really specified) and that failed too. I went to the Canon web site and downloaded a driver for W8. Now ready I went back to the W8 Control Panel and opened the network and this time I couldn't find even the XP machine, never mind the printer. It was after 11 PM by that time so I decided to try again in the morning -yet to be accomplished. But, before bed I decided to look at the DVD that came with the printer. it has no indication of what OS systems it supported, but I put it in the W8 and loaded both the driver and the software to operate the scanner (which by the way is a low resolution color scanner.. low resolution for B&W too, not a picture quality scanner which is the case for all home machines I have owned). I'm yet to try again to gain access from the W8 and W7 computers. Now on my second cup of coffee, and will try to access the XP machine when I get energetic enough to go to the other room and turn it on.