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wireless network configuration
I am preparing to set up a wireless network in my home. I've purchased a D-Link 54 Mbps 802.11g router (DI-524) and a pair of PCI adapters (DWL-G510). I also got a cardbus adapter (DWL-630) for my notebook. All computers (three desktops and the notebook) to be networked are running Windows XP (either Home or Pro) with SP2. The installation guides supplied with the cards and the router make the setup process sound pretty straightforward, but I have a few questions that I'd be interested in hearing advice/opinions on:
1) What are the relative merits of using the network configuration utlity that D-Link supplies vs letting Windows configure the network?
2) Should I expect interference between the wireless router and my wireless telephone (both are 2.4 GHz)? If so, is moving the telephone base station to another room enough to prevent this?
3) Should I expect conflicts between the wired and wirless ethernet adapters? Will I need to uninstall or disable the wired ethernet connections, or will Windows be able to auto-detect the connections that are active?
Thanks,
Michael
Gretschluvr
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Posted October 29th, 2004 10:00
The Dlink network configuration allows you to set the WPA-PSK which is the highest security. You get a graphic display of your connection speed etc.- Thanks for all the tips. I set up the my network last night, and it basically worked right out of the box. There are a few confusing things going on though. For one, the icons in my systray don't seem to agree with each other. If I mouse over the D-link icon, it generally says my signal strength is good to very good. However, there's also a windows network icon that tells me my signal strength is poor and my speed is not anything close to 54 Mbps. Sometimes, it even says that I have no connection while I'm surfing the web with no trouble at all. I suspect that this is largely due to the location of my router relative to the networked PCs, and I'm not worried about the speed for now, since even at its slowest its faster than the DSL. I suppose I can upgrade the antennas at some point in the future if there's a good enough reason.On the other hand, I can only get wireless connectivity when I set authentication to "open system." I guess I'm going to need to read up on WPA-PSK to figure out what other settings I might need to change to get it to work. I also can't seem to change the admin login name, which is not a big deal, but seems a bit silly. All in all though, I'm pretty pleased so far.Thanks again,Michael
Gretschluvr
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Posted October 31st, 2004 08:00
Michael, I found my router being too close to the monitor etc was effecting the wireless transmissions. I moved it and it helped. Also, if there is a cast iron pipe in the wall it will effect it. I had the sewer pipe vent stack right behind the router before.
inSOMNiak
28 Posts
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Posted October 28th, 2004 18:00