neyo

Ok, so for the good of well.. ‘good karma’, I offered to help a friend at work, sort out their home network. They had a couple of machines, running on XP, which they couldn’t get wirelessly networked. They have a 2Mbit DSL connection, a DSL router and 2 machines with wifi cards. In theory, it should be a piece of cake – hell, I have a similar setup in my own home…

Easy? You gotta be having a laugh! For those who know me, you’ll know I work exclusively on Mac’s, and it really was a piece of cake, setting up my own home network. I’m far from some Networking geek, I don’t even know properly what a DMZ is! But I am skillful enough, to get a home network working – or so i thought! Like I said, my Mac network, running on Airport Extreme (802.11g for you PC geeks) was a doddle to setup. Windows however, well… isn’t. The fact that the 2 machines, and hub, were of different manufacturer made things more of a challenge. With a Mac, everything is unified, and dare I say it, logical. On Windows, its hard to see where you might modify TCP/IP settings, and whether you have to modify them in the Windows WLAN TCP/IP window, or instead on the ‘control panel’ created by your WLAN card vendor. It really was a big mess! I did get it working, through more a case of trial and error really, but even then, it took a good half hour to then work out how to secure the network. It’s another pointer, for me, as to why I made the right choice, in working with Mac’s. Setting this up, tonight was quite a nightmare, in my opinion.