Welcome to another How-To guide provided by Houston PC Geeks. Today, we will help you setup a home wireless network, which is basically two or more desktops or laptops connected together using a router and sharing Internet access. In order to complete this task, you will need to have Internet access through cable or DSL, and you will need a computer or laptop for testing purposes. Your home computer network will start at your cable or DSL modem, then it will travel to your router and from there to all the other devices on your network.
Home DSL and Cable Internet Providers
The most common Internet providers, at least in the Houston area, are Comcast’s cable Internet and AT&T’s DSL service. Besides purchasing computers for your network, your first step would be to establish Internet service in your home. Both of the services listed above have their pros and cons, but either would work fine for wireless networking. Once you have your Internet service turned on, you can directly connect a computer to the cable or DSL modem with a network cable to test your Internet service. If all works well, you can disconnect the computer and connect a router. Your cable or DSL modem usually allows for one computer connected to it directly, so this is why we use a router which allows for multiple devices to use the same Internet access.
The Basics of Home Routers Setup
Routers are probably the most difficult part of this setup process and not because they are complicated, but because some people feel intimidated and unsure of their technical abilities when dealing with routers. We will have a future post dedicated to router set up in the next week or two. For now, you can connect your router to your cable or DSL modem with the network cable and then power them both up to allow the modem to pass along an IP address to the router.
Wireless Network Adapter Card Setup for Home Computers
Now that the router has been established on the network, we can focus on the computers. We still have some work to do, as far securing the network, but we will handle that later in this guide and the next. Each computer or laptop needs to have a wireless adapter card, either built into the machine, or added on. Most laptops these days come with wireless adapter chips preinstalled. Desktops, however, may not come with a wireless network card and will need to be installed before you can access the network and the Internet. We have found that the easiest network adapter cards for home installations are the USB wireless adapter cards. They are considered easy because you just install the software from the CD and plug-in the adapter into a USB port and your pc or laptop and it installs the needed drivers.
Securing your Home Wireless Network
At this point, we haven’t secured the router, so anyone within range could access your wireless network, and that is fine for now but we will handle this later. Now that your network wireless adapter cards are installed, we should be able to see some wireless activity. If you look at the icons to the bottom right of the screen by your clock, you should see some sort of wireless connection icon which will vary based on the adapter installed. Your next step is to click on this icon, open the wireless utility and select the network you wish to connect to, which should be your network. Since we haven’t configured the router yet, your network name may be something generic like Netgear, Linksys, 2Wire444 or something like that. For now just click the connect button and make sure your Internet access works.
You have now set up your home wireless network, and you could begin using it the way it is, but it’s best to log into the router and configure its security settings. For this guide, were mainly focused on the wireless security and administration settings. To start router configuration, we need to first log into your router using a web browser. So, start Internet Explorer or chrome or Firefox and clear out the address in the address bar. Here you want to type in your default gateway, which is the address of your router or typically 192.168.1.1. I will go into this in more detail in my next post on router configurations, but for now you need to login and go to the admin area and change the password to a secure password. Secure passwords are at least eight characters long, using a combination of numbers, letters, symbols, and a mixture of upper and lowercase letters.
Finally, look in your router settings for the wireless settings area, and you’ll notice that it is probably set to “open”, meaning that anyone with a wireless adapter can access your network. There are a few options here to choose from, which include WEP, WPA, and others. WPA has become the most common, but we still see people using WEP as well. From here you can choose a setting, pick a passphrase, and then connect your computers and laptops using the selected passphrase.
Setting up a wireless network in your home really isn’t a very difficult task, especially once you have done it once or twice. Get to learn your devices so that you can easily make changes or change passwords if you need to. Once a router is set up though, you rarely will need to make changes.
If you need help configuring or fixing problems with your home computer network, please give us a call or shoot us and email and we would be happy to help you get the issue resolved. We also handle home computer repairs as well as virus and malware removal.