Wireless Home Networking?

[sharky]

Anyone here have a wireless network in their home?

I have a netgear 802.11g wireless router that I network my laptop to my home office network. it works great!

Today I tried to install a Motorolla WPCI810G wireless PCI card into one of our desktops so I can move it into another room. I couldn't get the damn thing to work.. It wouldn't recognize any network in the area, althou my laptop was working fine on the network right next to it.

After over an hour on the phone with Motorola support they said it must be a bad card. Needless to say, I won't be buying motorola again. I'm going back to Netgear!

[0425]

Hopefully next year. I want to pick up a cheap laptop & go wireless, mainly for surfing the internet, and playing music. Is it possibly to get an RCA output for a laptop (would like to plug into house stereo)

[SeanB]

I have been running wireless at home for a couple of years. I started moving to G last year, but so far my wife is the only with a G card. My laptop is Centrino and when I bought it I assumed it was G, but didn't ask...oh well. The only reason I really wanted to move to G in the first place was to get some better range, but we still had some dead spots so I hooked up the old B access point on the other side of the house. Now the only one that has any trouble is my daughters 98 PC with a USB Dlink.

There are 3 to 4 other wireless networks that I can see in my neighborhood, and I am the only one that is secured. It is so simple to turn on WEP, even if it is not perfect, it is better than hanging your ass out there.

[sharky]

I took the Motorola card back today and bought a lynksis as that's all walmart had. Opened her up, started to install the software and the computer crashed. Hasn't come back up since. It hangs on the windows 2000 loading screen (the black one, not the graphical one!). I tried my recovery disks, no luck. I tried booting from CD, no luck. Only thing to do now is to reinstall windows... however I'm cautious as my wife has all her important biz info on that computer.

what should I do?

[StPeteBBQ]

Reboot the computer and while it's coming back up, press F8. (I think that's right). Then select "Last known good configuration". (or something similar to that, don't remember exactly).

That should let you boot up. When it boots, back all the important data up, and then reinstall windows.

[sharky]

tried that already:-( that is where the computer is freezing. It won't even boot into safe mode

[SeanB]

Try reinstalling windows, but do the overwrite option. I don't remember exactly how to get to it, but just want to install on top of what is there. This should wipe out the offending driver.

[sharky]

yeah, that's where I got nervous. it says I will lose all files and folders. I'm sure it just means in the winnt directory, but there is a lot of info that I don't want to lose in the other directories. lol. Just call me a wimp!

[SeanB]

Just don't format and it should be ok...

You can pull the drive and slave it in another box and pull the data off to be safe...of course if it is NTFS you could have a little trouble... ;)

[sharky]

it's fat32. I think I'll go ahead and try and we'll see what happens!

[sharky]

We went ahead and re-installed windows. Everythign is working fine now, although we do have to reinstall all the programs. a small price to pay as we have all the info we need saved!

[SeanB]

:D

I am glad it worked out.