I bought a router in April and tried and tried to hook it up with much frustration. It came with a regular router and another USB adapter thing that I know plugs into my alternate computer. I have 2 cd’s that came with it. The problem is after all these months I lost the instructions and box. I just have the router with cables, USB adapter and 2 cd’s. How do I hook this thing up without going crazy? Draw me a diagram or explain it very detailed so I don’t lose you. Thank you for your help.
2 CDs?
It depends on the brand of router, of course.
I have LinkSys equipment for a DSL line from the phone company.
It came with filter (a little blob of plastic with a phone line pigtail and two female phone jacks, one labeled “voice” and one labeled “DSL”.
I put the CD into the drive and powered it up. It walked me through the correct order of plugging the phone line into the filter, loading the DSL software from the disk, then connecting the router to the PC with an ethernet cable (the thing that looks like a phone line on steroids). I did not bother to unhook my phone modem until I was sure that I had the connections working properly.
One of your CDs should be the installation CD and it should walk you through the procedure even if the paper instructions have been eaten by the dog.
I have a TrendNet router and I think one cd is for the main router itself for one computer and the other cd is for the USB adapter for the alternate computer. Can you tell me exactly how to plug which wire from the router to the DSL without messing things up? I had big problems installing a DSL line. I know I’m very electronic incompetent. I had to have AOL come out and install the DSL line for me when I gave up after a few weeks of trying to install it.
I usually just plug it in near the workbench so that no one trips over the cord. And make sure you have a vacuum cleaner handy, or at least a broom, because those babies make a lot of wood shavings.
Mine’s a Black & Decker.
Computer questions like these generally fit better in our GQ forum. I’ll move it there for you.
If you have internet access (a safe bet, or we would not be having this conversation), can’t you go to the manufacturer’s website, click on “Support” and download all manuals you need?
At the very least, before we can help you, some additional info would help:
[ul][li]The model of router [/li][li]The type of internet access you want to share (DSL, cable, dial-up)[/li][li]Whether or not your computers already have network cards (the slightly-oversize sockets that look like telephone jacks)[/li][li]What happens if you try to hook up the router[/ul][/li]
If the internet works fine when a computer is plugged in directly, but fails when you put the router in the circuit, I’d suspect you have a DSL connection and need to resort to “MAC spoofing”, which is relatively easy to explain and implement.
When I first set up my router, I had a bitch of a time until it occurred to me to check my firewall settings. It turns out that Zonealarm was blocking traffic tofrom the router. So that might be something to check.
Go to the mfgr’s. web site, look for support, download everything applicable to your router and adapters. Follow the directions on the heel!