I’m at my father’s house. He has a Comcast wireless setup for his and his wife’s MacBooks. They have a WEP key set up, and each of their laptops connects with no trouble to the wireless. My old XP laptop used to connect just fine as well. However, I’m here now with my new laptop with Vista (which is probably the first time I’ve been here with a Vista machine but I’m not certain) and it will connect locally but keeps reporting that either the security key is wrong, or there’s something else wrong that it can’t fix. Problem is I’ve put the key in about 12 times and I don’t think I keep typing it wrong.
Is there some reason the Macs would be connecting all right and the PC wouldn’t?
Is this going to be my first experience getting frustrated by an argument over Mac vs PC?
Thanks in advance. I’m dogsitting all week and the internet would be, ah, useful.
My Vista laptop hatehatehatehatehates connecting to my home network. Try resetting the modem/router (unplugging both for about 10 seconds, plugging in the modem and letting it boot, and then the router after it’s done booting), for some reason my Vista laptop will only connect if the router is reset while the wireless card is turned on if it has even been on another network between home connections.
[aside]Also, you may want to look into setting up a higher security level for them. WEP has all the security of a wet paper towel and anyone with a desire to learn and a week of Googling can break it pretty easily (slight exaggeration, but not much), it doesn’t serve any real purpose other than being a minor annoyance to the people intended to use the network and WPA/2 is exactly the same amount of hassle to enter a password for with much greater resistance against cracking.[/aside]
Have you made sure that the password is being input in the language the computer expects? I know that I’ve experience cases in mixed computing environments where one computer is fine with an English WEP key and another insists on a hexadecimal equivalent.
Also, you might play with the type of security setting. Windows and Macs have slightly different options for WEP, WPA and WPA2. I know that my Vista laptop needed a different network type than I expected when I got it working on my Airport network.
I also know that Vista sometimes needed a reboot to get it to work at all when I moved it from the office network to the home network. It should have been able to switch from one to the other easily, but didn’t always. (The explanation I got from tech support had something to do with HP’s network detection after sleep).
All in all, it’s been a good reminder that I really should have bought a Mac laptop even if the lower end ones don’t have the screen size I want…
Do you have access to the router? I would try to switch from WEP to WPA. That might solve the issue and move your parents up to a basic non-broken security level. Troubleshooting WEP really shouldnt be wasting your time like this. Move on up!
Reboots and router restarts have been fruitless thus far. I’ve tried switching the laptop to try to connect using different kinds of authentication, but WEP is the only one that the network will talk with. And no, I don’t have the password for the router or I’d be tempted to just take the security off altogether, if nothing else.