Wireless woes

I would prefer to have a wired connection to the HTPC, but getting a cable from the front room where the DSL router is to the living room is going to be hard. The DSL connection comes into the house in a place that is hard to drop cables to the rest of the house. I've managed to get a wired connection from the DSL router to the room next door, but not to the rest of the house. Fortunately, my friend Judy has some wireless G equipment that she replaced with N equipment. Hey, I'll take hand me downs, so I decided to give a wireless solution a try. I don't really plan to download HD content over this connection, but schedule information would really be nice.

I started by plugging in the wireless G router into the existing network. I suppose I could have replaced the DSL router with the wireless router, but I have had a wireless router in that location before, and it had poor coverage to the rest of the house. Instead, I decided to put the wireless router in the room adjacent to the one with the DSL router. In that room, the wireless router will be closer to where the room where the HTPC will be.

The first thing that I did was find the rest button on the wireless router and set it back to its factory settings. It then wanted to run a setup program where it established a PPPoE connection to the server on the other end of the DSL line. Fortunately the two routers are from different manufactures, so they already had different IP addresses. I just plugged a network cable from the DSL router into the wireless router's uplink connection, stopped the setup program, and switched the wireless router into manual setup mode. I then selected an ISP connection without a login, told the router to get IP addresses and the DNS address from the ISP (in this case the DSL router) and to my surprise, that seemed to work. I finished off by setting up the wireless network with encryption. Wow, that was easy. Too easy.

So, then I turned my attention to the HTPC. Judy had given me a low profile wireless G PCI card, but it had full size mounting bracket. However, inside the antistatic bag was a low profile mounting bracket, so I removed the full sized one and tried to put on the low profile one. That's when I discovered that it didn't match the card. The holds in the mounting bracket didn't match the holds in the PCI card. I could slip the low profile mounting bracket over the connection for the antenna, but the holes for the LEDs didn't match the actual LEDs. I started to install the PCI card without a mounting bracket and then I noticed that the CD was from one board manufacturer and the card was for another. Hmmm. I fired off an email to Judy and hoped that she had the correct combination of parts still.

Fortunately I had a plan B as Judy had given me a wireless G USB transceiver. I tried to install the driver software off the CD and it didn't work. It probably didn't work on Vista. There was a version online that said that it was Vista ready. So I downloaded and installed it, and when the installation asked that I plug in the USB device, Windows said that it couldn't find any drivers for the device. I tried this several times (once actually reading the instructions), and I could never get the USB device to run. Then I saw this on the manufacturer's website:

"Since there is a limited market for 64-bit drivers, and creating them is expensive, has no immediate plans to release 64-bit drivers for products. This would raise the cost of the products for all other customers. If you install the 64-bit operating system, all drivers and utilities on that computer may stop working! Of course, much other software and drivers will also stop working, so you should consider whether you want to go to the expense and risk of changing to this operating system."

Well, isn't that special. I knew that this was a danger when I started, but I don't plan to back down now. I'm sure that I can find another manufacturers that are more enlightened, but I wonder if the wireless PCI card that Judy gave me is going to have the same problem. I decided a trip to my local electronics toy store was in order.

So, I made a quick trip there and found a low profile card, but I wasn't sure about the drivers, so I didn't buy it. I also looked for a wireless keyboard with touch pad or trackball. I finally found one for $150. Ha! Before I shell out $150 for a keyboard I hope not to use much, I'll buy a Blu-Ray drive instead.

Stay tuned!