A company with networked computers has several advantages over a company with identical computers that are not networked. Computers use resources such as hard drives, modems, printers, CD-ROM drives, and scanners, which can add up in costs. Networked computers can detect and share all these resources on the network. Therefore, if your computers are networked, you need to purchase only one CD-ROM drive for your computers. If your computers are not networked, however, you'll need one CD-ROM drive for each computer.
Networked computers can access the Internet through one modem.
All the computers in the art department can be hooked up to one scanner. This won't save you a trip across the room to place an image on the scanner, but a network will allow you to transfer large files from the scanner to any computer on the network without having to compress the file and copy it to a Zip disk or CD-ROM first. On a network, you don't need one printer per computer. You only need one printer per department or floor. All computers on the network can use any printer on the network.