Hi all, I'm visiting my mother and trying to help her set up a network between her desktop and laptop. I use a simple network at home with a cable modem, Linksys router, and Linksys wireless cards. She has SBC DSL connected to her desktop and appears to have no ethernet card, but instead has the ethernet cable plugged into an ethernet/usb adapter. She has a Gateway brand router (WBR-100) and a Linksys Wireless-G card for her laptop. I suspect these won't work together, but for now my problem is that I can't even get the router to work with her dsl modem. I tried plugging the dsl modem into the router's WAN port and then running a cable from one of the other ports to her ethernet/usb adapter and was unable to get a signal. My questions are: 1. Could the router problem be that it simply isn't set up properly yet? My mother said it worked with this computer before, but she can't remember any of the details. 2. Will this router be incompatible with a wireless-g card? 3. If I were to purchase a Linksys Wireless-G router, would I be able to use that with her SBC dsl and ethernet/usb adapter to create a network between her desktop and laptop? Thanks in advance for any help!

There are many reasons why the router is not working. Have you gone through the set-up routine for the router? Check the documentation (find it online if you don't have it) and the steps to set up the router. My guess would be that SBC uses the MAC address for authentication. The MAC address is a unique ID for every device connected to a network (router, PC, printer, etc). SBC may have been using the MAC address of the computer for authentication. If that is the case, many routers have the ability to "clone" the MAC address from a computer so the cable company still thinks the modem is connected to the computer. As for the wireless card, the router uses the 802.11b technology. The wireless card uses the 802.11g technology. These two technologies are incompatible, but most g devices are backward compatible to b. You need to check if the Linksys card can operate on the 802.11b spec. Michael J

Michael, thanks for your input. I fiddled with it some more and realized that what I was assuming was a dsl modem was actually a one-point router. I felt rather stupid, but I did manage to get her laptop connected wirelessly. Now we have a new problem. Here's the total situation: we have a HomePortal 1000HG router hardwired to her desktop pc and the connection works fine. The laptop has a Broadcom wireless pci adapter. Both are wireless b, not g. The problem is that the wireless connection frequently drops and then immediately alerts me that there are wireless connections available and I have to manually reconnect. It drops about every two minutes, which pretty much rules out a frequency problem with the cordless phones. Any idea what could be causing this? Thanks in advance.

Run the wireless networking wizard and make sure it's set to automatically connect to your wireless network when in range. Then check the Lease timeout in the DHCP configuration on the router. If it's set for some absurdly low value (like 2 minutes), your client will lose connection and have to renew on that schedule...but of course if it's not set up to automatically connect to your wireless network it won't.