I’ve finally joined the 2000’s — I’m kicked back in bed, typing away on a laptop that’s on a wireless connection.

I mentioned before that last week, Prairie and I picked up a laptop ‘puter. While it came with a pre-installed wireless card, we still had to physically plug it in, as with naught but desktops beforehand, we’d never had any need to go wireless. So, while Prairie was on her trip (where Hermie — named so because, when charging, pink and blue lights glow on the front, prompting Prairie to comment that it’s a hermaphrodite — apparently performed quite well), I picked up an Airport card for my computer.

Theoretically, we should have been able to coax Hermie into picking up a wireless signal from my computer, but no matter what we tried, it didn’t seem to work. As we had a few errands to run, we added a quick run by Target and picked up a little home wireless router from D-Link. Came home, hooked it up…and viola! Wireless is up and running on my desktop and on Hermie.

I am running into one little issue, however — and as I’m just not used to working (er…fighting) with Windows, let alone Vista, I’m hoping there might be some ideas. Right now, in order for Hermie to connect, I have to run the network wide open, with WEP completely disabled. If I turn WEP on, then instead of asking for a password, Vista immediately gives me an error message telling me that Windows did not get a response from the router…however, it pops that message up so quickly that it doesn’t seem to even be waiting for a response. Odd, and a little frustrating. I haven’t tried switching over to WPA yet to see if that works, but that might be my next bet, as all the Google-fu I can muster on the error I’m getting tells me to reinstall the drivers for my wireless adapter. :p Meh.

So far so good, though…

Update: We’re up and running using WPA-Personal. I’m not exactly sure how or why — it took a couple tries and it wasn’t working at first, but for some unknown reason suddenly it got a successful connection. Nifty!

[See also: Better Buy | Stop! | I need a new router | Random downtime fixed | (And by ‘next laptop,’ I mean the one… ]

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