wireless for dialup?

I'm new to networking and would like to set up a wireless system in my home I have a desktop running xp-home and a laptop running xp-professional. I would like to know if there is a wireless router that can be used with dialup as that is all that is available in my area.

 

I think your best option once you get the PCs networked would be to use a modem in one of them and allow the other to share the modem by setting up ICS for the sharing.

There may be a more elegant solution (and hopefully someone will post it if they know one) but with a little tweaking of the network settings on the PCs this should do you fine.

If/when you do get broadband and decide to use it, switching over will be very simple.

 

I tried that but the wireless router I tried it with was for broadband and wouldn't let me connect thru the host computer. Or else I just had it set up wrong. I tried using the setup wizard with xp but just kept going around in circles. If I set it up to use dialup to connect to the internet then computers wouldn't talk to each other as far as I could tell. The instructions I got with the router just say to use xp to set it up. So I thought if I could get a wireless router that was for dialup I could maybe set it up that way. But when I search the internet I can't find any info on them. I found a belkin that the manufacturer says will work but in the data on line about it there isn't any mention of dialup. it is a Belkin F5D7130 Wireless Network Access Point.

 

Kathy,
the KISS solution for me, (Keep it Simple Stupid) that I went for was to buy a wireless PCI card. the following is my example.
http://www.netgear.com.au/products/prod_details.asp?prodID=208&view=
My dialup modem was also in the main PC the wireless card went into. I then connected to my Toshiba laptop using the slower (because that's all the laptop built in wireless supports) 802.11b protocol. I connected both using the Ad-hoc conectivity, and didn't worry about all the security encryption because outside the house the signal was basically nonexistent. It works fine for our use. My wife can access the internet at the same time as me if need be, or we can just use the lappy (as long as the main PC is dialed into the ISP) with no appreciable speed decrease.

I also prefered to use XP's built in software instead of the software that came with the PCI card. But I used the Toshiba connectivity software for configuring the laptop. It is worth installing SP2 for XP as well. It slightly improved my wireless reliability and throughput.

 

Kathy - I'll take a guess at what is causing your attempts to fail and offer something you can try.

Your wireless device has too many features for what you want to do and you will need to stop it from using some of them. You basically want it to be a wireless switch and to only provide connection between the PCs. You do not want it doing DHCP to assign IP address values to the PCs.

ICS will also want to be your DHCP server and you don't want to allow that either. You gotta set it up manually. Luckily that isn't too hard.

- get the PCs talking to each other (file/folder/printer sharing working) via the wireless router.

- go into settings for the router and put it's internal/LAN/Local network address to 192.168.0.100 if you can. I'm not familiar with the device and can't give you specifics. If it won't allow that, you may not later be able to use a browser based page to work on it. The subnet mask need to be 255.255.255.0.

- enable ICS host on the PC with the modem.

- in the settings for the network card, set for static/fixed IP address and subnet mask. Use 192.168.0.1 as the address and 255.255.255.0 as the subnet mask. Leave the gateway address blank.

- in the settings for the network card on the other PC (the client) set the IP address as 192.168.0.10, the subnet mask as 255.255.255.0 and the gateway as 192.168.0.1 (so it points to the host PC).

With those settings you should be able to share files/printers on the two PCs and should also be able to complete the ICS setup to share the modem.

 

Yes, you can set up a wireless network between your computers and use
Internet Connection Sharing to share a dial-up

You can set up the wireless network in any of these ways:

1. An Ad-Hoc network, with no wireless router or access point.

2. With a wireless access point connected, using a crossover cable, to
a wired Ethernet port on the host computer.

3. With a wireless router. Connect both computers to its LAN ports.
Don't connect anything to its WAN (Internet) port. Disable the
router's DHCP server so that it doesn't interfere with ICS.
I snitched this from Practically Networked -Steve Winogard

 

If I decide to go with the ad-hoc wireless network can anyone tell me exactly how to set it up? Do I need anything else but the card in my laptop and one in my desktop?

 

Here is a good article to start. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/expert/bowman_02april08.mspx

 

Praise you Newt! Your tips about disabling automatic IP assignament since we are only using the router for onsite LAN really solved my problem. I am using an Airlink system.

My router's IP is 192.168.1.1
It defaults to tell me to use IP addresses from 192.168.1.100 to 192.168.1.199 for my computers

I set one to .101 and the other to .102 Slick. Worked great.

Tom Haws

 

There is a simple and very low cost solution, try www.nebowireless.com. This compnay only advertises on AOL and eBay. Take a look of user comments on eBay http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewFeedback&userid=nebowireless