March 07, 2003
Going wireless

With a big assist from Michael Croft, we installed a wireless router today. Now both machines can connect to the Net. Shweet!

Of course, the process wasn't without a fair amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth. The original PC is a 200 MHz Compaq Presario that Tiffany bought in 1997. We finally bought a nice new Dell recently, and it's been sitting upstairs and unconnected until today. Since the cable modem comes in on the ground floor, into the room where the old PC is, the original idea was to connect the old PC to the wireless router via the Ethernet card that came with the cable modem. The upstairs PC would get a wireless adapter installed to talk to the router.

The problem was that the Ethernet card had never actually worked in the old computer. The tech who installed the cable modem could never get Windows 95 to recognize the device. I wound up upgrading the machine to Win98 so I could connect the cable modem to the USB port. But hey, we still had the Ethernet card, so we figured we'd give it a shot.

Bad move. Win98 eventually recognized the device, but we could never get the drivers to bind to it. After several futile hours, we gave up, took a break for dinner (which Tiffany made as thanks for the help), bought a USB adapter, and voila! There was much rejoicing.

Next on our list is to install the print server software that came with the router so we can print to the nice HP LaserJet from the upstairs machine. Life is beautiful all the time.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on March 07, 2003 to See, I do have a life! | TrackBack
Comments
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

Then give up and come up with a different solution, there's no use being a damn fool about it.

The ethernet card is probably fine. The PC had a hardware problem with the entire expansion bay. This is one of those oddball designs from big Q where all the expansion is on a riser card that inserts itself perpendicularly to the mobo. &kt;shrug>

Note: Tiffany is an excellent cook and makes yummy crabcakes. All praises thereunto...

Posted by: Michael on March 8, 2003 7:11 AM
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

Then give up and come up with a different solution, there's no use being a damn fool about it.

The ethernet card is probably fine. The PC had a hardware problem with the entire expansion bay. This is one of those oddball designs from big Q where all the expansion is on a riser card that inserts itself perpendicularly to the mobo. <shrug>

Note: Tiffany is an excellent cook and makes yummy crabcakes. All praises thereunto...

Posted by: Michael on March 8, 2003 7:12 AM

Sheesh, get a mac already ;^) Actually, we've had no trouble at all with a mixed bag of macs & PCs sharing a mixed-media (some wireless, some not) network. I suspect that one reason is that the PCs are fairly new, and only one of the macs is older (1998). BUt it is still running OSX 10.2 so we can use it as a file server for the PCs as well.

Posted by: David on March 8, 2003 11:55 AM