How to Activate Streaming to Share Media on Your Windows 10 Laptop

Digital Literacy For Dummies

Media sharing, or streaming, is normally disabled for Windows 10 laptops. To activate the feature and make your laptop’s music, pictures, and video available to other computers on a private network, follow these steps:

Open the Control Panel.

Press the Win+X keyboard shortcut and choose Control Panel from the supersecret menu.
Beneath the Network and Internet heading, click the link titled Choose Homegroup and Sharing Options.

The Homegroup window appears.
Click the Change Advanced Sharing Settings link.
Display the options in the All Networks area.

Click the chevron to display the area if it’s hidden.
Click the Choose Media Streaming Options link.
Click the Turn On Media Streaming button.

A list of network devices capable of accessing your laptop appears. You can remove items from this list by removing their check marks.
Click OK.

Your laptop’s media is now shared.

Pictures, videos, and music on your laptop are accessed by other network PCs. Your Internet-ready TV and Xbox One use other techniques to access the media.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.