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Wasn’t sure where to put this, so I thought here. If you could help, that would be great.
My in-laws have a cable modem hooked up to a dlink wireless-n router. They also have both Macs and PCs. They have always been able to set up the PCs hardwired and the Mac’s wireless, and having a password connected wireless setup. However, my brother-in-law just moved back in with them for a closer school, and he got an older PC laptop, as well as my mother-in-law (they were old ones from her work).
Anyway, both are Dells, one is a Dell Latitiude D630 with a Dell 1490 wireless miniPCIe card (so within the case, not sticking out). The other is a Dell Latitude D500, which we picked up a $30.00 wireless PCIe Card for it yesterday. I can get both computers to “see” the network, but neither of them can connect due to the password protection. When I disable the password protection for the wireless network they connect fine, so I know the cards are working fine. But I can’t get it to work with a password put in.
For full disclosure, originally the password was 9 digits, lets just say jared5118. I tried to connect, and one of the computers asked for 64 or 128 bit encryption, and when I selected 64 bit, it said the password needed to be 10 digits. So I changed it to jared51182, but still nothing.
On the one we bought the card for, it gave an option of either entering a passcode and generating a key, or entering the key manually, but as I had set up the router with the “jared51182” password, I thought that would work but nothing.
Again, I am more of a mac person for troubleshooting network issues, mostly because I hardwire my PCs, and use mobile Macs. Again, the Macs work fine, they just ask for a password, and get on the network without a problem, but its the PCs that can’t connect to a protected wireless network.
I have done a little research, and think it has something to do with how the two systems (windows vs. mac) deal with passwords when wirelessly connecting.
Sorry for the wall of text. And thank you in advance for your help.
I am guessing you just need the router password protected so the average joe won’t steal the internet.
If this is the case, set the security settings in the router to WEP 64 bit. This will require a 10 digit key (I typically just use a phone number). You should have no problems getting any of those computers to connect to a WEP- protected router.
If you want it a bit more secure, setup the router using WPA security (NOT WPA2 – WPA2 is more secure but some older cards may not support it). not sure the character requirements on that one but you should be able to use the jared5118 thing; if not, I know the phone number trick works (thats what I use on my WPA protected wireless). Also when you setup WPA you need to know if you used TKIP or AES; not sure the differences but you will need to specify if you manually make a connection.
Also keep in mind the older wireless cards can’t connect to WPA2 encrypted networks.
WEP is your best bet as quite literally anything can connect to it.
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