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Setting up Wireless --- sometimes an adventure |
Internet and Technology
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Wireless setup is getting easier and easier, but it still suffers from too much technical clutter for the user and lack of documentation that gets to the point. You have to have the right combination of hardware and software. Today, we were asked to help a person set up wireless in their home. They had a brand new MAC. The salesman had recommended a wireless hub for them, but they did not know how to hook it up. So what happened? We opened the box for the hub and found a murky one sheet instruction sheet and a CD. We hooked up the cables and saw that the Internet was still working fine.... so far so good. The hub was passing the Internet traffic properly. Expecting to see an install Wizard start from the CD, we were disappointed... nothing started and the CD contained only a PC Wizard. There were no instructions for the MAC. In order to get going we accessed the wireless hub as a URL. This is not something that the average homeowner knows how to do. We looked through the settings on the hub to see if they were ok. They seemed to be fine, but where was the password for protection? To test the wireless, we disconnected the MAC from the cable modem and hoped that it could see and communicate with the hub in a wireless manner. That worked. We were making progress. Now how do we set the password for wireless security so others could not use their high speed cable connection or hack into their hub? We hopped onto the Internet to see if others could help us. No luck, but in the process we were able to review the setup, if the Mac had been a PC. We noted something that did not say password, but looked like it could be the setting that we wanted. It was the number 1234567890. We replaced this with a strong password that the friend wanted and everything worked fine. Total time to set up -- 1 hour 15 minutes. Expected time 15 minutes.
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