Wireless Router Compatibility Question

Factual Questions
1

About two and a half months ago, I moved into an apartment with a my best friend and his roommate, Chris. Chris has cable Internet but it was just hooked up to his desktop computer and there was no wireless setup. My friend has a laptop (an iBook), but he’s over at his boyfriend’s house so often that he just doesn’t use the Internet here in the apartment.

But I’m here quite a bit more and I wanted to have wireless Internet for my MacBook, so I went to the Apple store and bought an Airport Express device. What I didn’t realize was that Chris’s desktop doesn’t have a wireless card, so the only way for me to use the Internet now is to hook up the Airport Express when he’s not using his computer.

I went to Best Buy and bought a Belkin wireless adapter for Chris’s computer and it worked for a little while, but then stopped. I uninstalled all of the Belkin programs and drivers and then reinstalled them and that fixed the problem, but again, only for a little while. Chris has a friend who I was told knows a thing or two about computers. This friend came over and said that the problem was that the router (the Airport Express device) was an Apple product and therefore incompatible with Chris’s Windows-running PC.

This sounds like bullshit to me. First of all, it’s a wireless router, not a program, and I don’t see how compatibility would even be an issue (though I admit I’m not that knowledgeable about computers). Second, it does work for a little while after I uninstall and reinstall the Belkin stuff—if it were a compatibility issue, it would never have worked at all, right?

Can any dopers shed some light on this issue?

2

I’m not sure how the Air Port Express is supped to operate, but with other wireless routers you simply connect the wireless router to the cable modem feeding the desktop and then hook the desktop unit directly to one of the Ethernet ports on the back of the router so it maintains a direct wired connection. You then set the notebooks & other remote units up to operate wirelessly.

Does the Airport unit not operate this way?

3

I have used an Apple with a Belkin router. Chris’ friend’s a dope. Have you hooked up to the router to see what’s going on (plug its ip address into your browser, for example, or however its software works)? Is it losing the signal when you put your computer to sleep or something? What exactly isn’t working?

4

Whoops-- read that backward. I have had people with PC wireless cards use my Apple wireless router. Works either direction.

5

[QUOTE=astro]
I’m not sure how the Air Port Express is supped to operate, but with other wireless routers you simply connect the wireless router to the cable modem feeding the desktop and then hook the desktop unit directly to one of the Ethernet ports on the back of the router so it maintains a direct wired connection. You then set the notebooks & other remote units up to operate wirelessly.

Does the Airport unit not operate this way?
[/QUOTE]
That’s exactly how I set it up and it works fine on my computer.

[QUOTE=capybara]
Chris’ friend’s a dope.
[/quote]
Yeah, that’s kind of what I thought. Some people seem to have this notion that Macs and PCs are completely different kinds of machines. I remember someone telling a story (here, I think) about trying to transfer a picture from a PC to a Mac (or vice versa) in a college library computer lab and the librarian completely freaking out about it because she thought they weren’t compatible and that it would destroy the computer he was trying to transfer the file to.

[QUOTE=capybara]
Have you hooked up to the router to see what’s going on (plug its ip address into your browser, for example, or however its software works)?
[/QUOTE]
You’ve completely lost me here. Like I said, I really don’t know that much about how computers work.

[QUOTE=capybara]
Is it losing the signal when you put your computer to sleep or something? What exactly isn’t working?
[/QUOTE]
Sorry, I meant to go over that in the OP and forgot to. When I first install the software, the computer (and it’s Chris’s, by the way, not mine) is able to get the signal and get online. But after an unspecified amount of time (unspecified because I don’t know it’s happened until Chris tells me), the computer is no longer able to get online.

At this point, when I pull up the wireless manager (or whatever it’s called; the list of detected wireless signals in the vicinity), it’s completely blank, whereas it wasn’t when I first installed the software. Even if it can’t detect my Apple Express signal for whatever reason, it shouldn’t be blank, because we’re in an apartment building with tons of detectable signals. And through all of this, my Airport card in my MacBook is still able to detect all the signals in our part of the building. So I remove the Belkin software, reinstall it, and it works fine again. For a while. Wash, rinse, repeat.

As far as putting the PC to sleep, I hadn’t thought about that, but that might be it. Well, it doesn’t go to sleep exactly, but maybe when the screen saver comes up. Could that be it?

6

[QUOTE=MidnightRadio]
That’s exactly how I set it up and it works fine on my computer.
[/QUOTE]

So.. if your friend was directly connected to the cable modem, and you put the Airport router in line with the modem, why don’t you just connect him directly with an ethernet cable to one of the ports on the Airport unit, why use wireless for that connection?

7

What Astro said.