Friday 25 May 2007

Wi-Fi at Last

The setup and configuration of the Belkin Wireless Router attached to my cable modem and Dell PC went *relatively* painlessly. After moving the cable modem from my Laptop to the Dell and checking that it was working OK (after power cycling the modem to get it to recognise the new system), I simply plugged the modems ethernet into the Belkin router and connected the router to the Dell PC using the supplied ethernet cable. The internet worked on the Dell via the router, so I then connected the supplied Belkin configuration webpage and setup security settings for my router. The router rebooted with the new settings and everything was working OK on the Dell.

Next I installed the Belkin software on my Laptop and was able to then connect the USB adapter. I had to muck around a bit getting the network connection working (initially it found a Linksys wireless network with a signal strength of 40%, which soon dropped off and disappeared. I guess this was a Wi-Fi network from one of the neighbours!). After a bit of mucking around and a reboot of the Laptop my Belkin network was identified and the Laptop showed that the connection to the router was working, but not the connection to the internet. A few cycles through powering everything down and up again, and rebooting the laptop eventually got everything working OK. It seems that the Norton Security only recognised and permitted the new network connection when I rebooted the Laptop after the connection to the network was working OK.

Eventually everything was working OK, with both the Dell and the Laptop having access to the internet. Now my only problem is why Firefox loads enoughwealth.com OK on the Laptop but freezes up every time I try to access that page on the Dell (Firefox accesses other websites via the Dell fine). Oh, and the fact that every now and again Vista seems to lose the cable modem internet connection and can't reconnect (it seems to be trying to do a dial up to a cable connection!) - so I have to power cycle everything to get things working again. And that the version of IE that came preinstalled on the Dell includes to Google toolbar, and when I installed the Alexa toolbar it seems to be doing strange things (its seems to be referencing a blank 'page' above the main browser page, rather than getting info on the page you're currently viewing...

Anyhow, overall it's been one of the less painful network setups I've done (then again the last one I did was an mixed PC and mac ethernet wired network ten years ago - things have got more plug 'n play since then).

Enough Wealth

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

what a painfull process. you need to buy a mac!

enoughwealth@yahoo.com said...

Macs are cool too, and have always have the advantage of the hardware being built exactly to the requirements of the OS. But getting a new Mac wouldn't have helped me getting my existing Laptop working with the new wireless router any easier.

However, the main reason I bought a Wintel PC (again) is that I have some existing peripherals that only work with a Wintel. Some types of peripherals still aren't available for Mactel systems - eg. SCAT pistol training system, telescope guidance and control system, Lego Mindstorms robotics system etc. It also meant that I can keep using many of my existing apps - emulating Windows on the Mac is an alternative (except where there's a hardware interface requirement), but there's not much point buying a Mac if you spend all your time running it as a Windows emulator ;)