Wireless laptop but dialup internet connection

I received a call to the pc helpdesk last night. A gentleman had got a laptop for his daughter for Christmas and as this laptop was wireless capable as standard he understandably wanted to go on the Internet wirelessly. This was not possible for the gentleman in question, as he currently is still using a dialup connection and is getting broadband installed soon. Wireless laptops or desktop PCs connect to a wireless router, that is always online. Unless you have a wireless router attached to your phone line receiving an Internet signal, and in turn transmitting that signal to be received by your computer, you wont be able to receive the signal with the PC. Well, unless you hook up to one of your neighbours broadband connections that is. If you connect to the Internet with a dial up connection then you can only use one computer on that service at a time and it must be plugged directly into the telephone line. If you connect with a broadband connection you can use over 200 computers online at once. And you can still make and receive telephone calls at the same time, unlike dial up. Go on get Broadband, Wink.

Callouts 2007

I am writing this little post to advise people of any call outs last year that involved problems that seem to keep coming back with different customers. One problem that I encountered in October 2007 my site still gets hits regarding this dodgy device today. The device I'm talking about is the d-link wireless networking adapter DWA-111. I haven't had any issues with any other d-link devices to date, and this little wireless networking device is usually sold as part of a router and adapter set with the router working just fine, but it seems there is some sort of problem with the device driver supplied with this package. When I received the call to my Help desk 08717890976 the gentleman in question told me he had a wireless networking problem on xp I immediately thought it would be a quick fix. First i checked to see if the networking device was attached and on, power indicator on so ok. Checked in the device manager, device was there but no driver installed for that device although the gentleman had tried to install it. I again tried to talk him through the driver installation but with no success either. I advised that there seemed to be an issue with that driver disc and that I would locate a suitable device driver online. On visiting the d-link web site I found that not only could I not locate the device driver for the DWA-111. I could not locate any trace of the DWA-111 at all. The only information I could retrieve was from other people who also had similar problems. I have posted a link to that information on the links page http://sashomepcnnetworkingsupport.co.uk/links.aspx I advised the customer of this and suggested that if he wanted me to confirm this I could call out to him with two other wireless networking devices and see if either of these showed any problems. The gentleman thought this would be the best solution as the laptop in question had needed xp upgraded to sp2 to go wireless as it had only sp1 previous to these issues. I called with the gentleman the next morning and tried to install the DWA-111 from scratch myself but when we got to the part where the driver crashed out it did the same as always. I completely removed d-link drivers and the adapter and installed a BT wireless networking device and installed the drivers and whoosh of it went straight away. I would not recommend the d-link DWA-111 to anyone, there are occasions when people have plugged it in and it worked, but from what I have read these occasions are few and far between and most of these users still have cnnection problems when they do get it to work.

eeepc701 wireless networking

On the first of January 2008 I was called out to work on the smallest computer that I have ever laid eyes on. It was an eeepc 701 with a linxus operating system and really was small enough to put in your pocket. The lady that had called me out was able to make a connection to the internet via the ethernet cable, but wanted to go wireless as the eeepc 701 does have built in wireless. Unfortunately though it did not have a disc drive to read the cd from her isp, and I know for a fact that her supplier sky do not support that operating system anyway. When trying to connect to the wireless network it was seeing it then stayed pending and never quite got there. fter changing the encryption settings on the pc to the same as the routers, inths case wpa psk, the networking software looked a little happier, but we still could not make a wireless internet connection. I set the dns server address, in the tcp/ip section to the routers ip address to allow the isp to assign the dns server address. The routers (or default gateway) address in this case was 192.168.0.1. After this change was made we were able to connect to the internet wirelessly.