March 18th, 2006 | Category:
During the course of the past few days, I have been setting up the wireless network between PCs for the studio. I invested in LinkSys adapters and a LinkSys wireless router (with speed booster). The user guides that came with the hardware touted a simple step-by-step setup. And as with most of these step-by-step hardware things go, in between steps something often goes wrong… or wasn’t made clear.
First the problem was I wasn’t getting any internet access from my modem when my router was connected. Because the “easy” step-by-step setup wouldn’t go forward from step 8. I eventually fixed that by going online and chatting with a LinkSys tech support agent, downloading and working a setup utility. The hardware got itself running well enough.
Next I had to connect 2 PCs to each other wirelessly. I got them working really quick — and even got them each to connect to the Internet. But I wanted to change the default ID on the network (a security measure). I tried to do so and somehow ended up losing that Internet connection (even when my router said I still had a connection.) On Windows, you see… all this help talk about “networks” and Network Wizards got me confused whether I was connecting to my local area network (LAN) or to the Internet.
Next I had my local network all connected and given a new ID only to find my Internet still not coming through from my router. Thinking my router was the problem, I did the easy step-by-step setups again (this time, it was able to push pass step 8.) That didn’t work. I called up customer service of my ISP, Greendot. The guys there couldn’t help me with any router issues. Not their responsibility nor do they know anything about routers. Then they kept explaining memorized route steps. They were telling me to use the New Connection Wizard to access the ISP, type in a username & pass, etc.
Well that didn’t work.
They never bothered to ask me whether I needed to type in a username & password to connect to the ISP in the first place. Which I don’t.
Hours later I called customer service again and got a lady to walk me through the process. She asked the right question and that solved the problem.
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