Adventures in Technology: Episode #2 - conclusion

Adventures in Technology: Episode #2 - conclusion - The agony of faulty hardware.

The Easy Wireless Home Network

When we last visited this little project, Peter's wireless setup appeared to be working, although the signal was weak. Well - a weak signal even though the access point was 5 feet away with a clear line of sight should have triggered some major ahooga warning bells.

Turns out the Linksys card was one flaky piece of silcon crap. The card kept losing network connection and locking up Peter's PC. After some contemplation, I decided to order another PCI adapter card  - this time Orinoco - enough of this Linksys stuff. My boss, Richard, loaned us an Orinoco PCMIA card.

Tonight (after an afternoon of wireless troubleshooting) we decided to attempt the install. Well at first everything went very well - Peter sucessfully installed the card with a minimum of effort. But then the drivers didn't install correctly and it took 20 minutes of hard crashes, restarting Windows in Safe Mode (ugh), and rebooting before we got the driver installed.

But after the driver was installed, we had an all-too-brief eureka! moment - the signal indicator was bright green and the signal was excellent. But alas we had no network - sob. The ipconfig utility came up with the default non-network ip address. Depression set in.

But, after reviewing the Orinoco manual, I discovered that the TCP -> Orinoco protocol had not been added. Windows 98 is definitely more primative than XP (but it's a heck of a lot more stable). Anyhoo, I added the TCP protocol, rebooted, and - EUREKA!! A strong network connection!!! Happy surfing ensued.

Case Closed.

Moral: home wireless networking is never easy.

© Copyright 2005 Stephanie A. Kesler. Last update: 3/5/2005; 10:49:09 PM.