The other day a friend of mine called and let me know his wireless router had stopped working. It was almost brand new, and I’d helped him with it a little bit. He’d originally set it up himself, and had some trouble and the DLink man had him set some really whacky stuff in there, but iut worked at the time.
Then it didn’t and he called me. He’d already talked to TDS and DLink already, and they’d both told him the router was dead, return it.
The first thing I did was get the router off the net, and make the laptop talk to it. We totally reset it, and went back to a 192 IP range.
That worked fine.
I plugged the modem back in and ran the wizard. That worked fine.
I got both laptops online wirelessly. All was well. As it turns out, all the hardware was working fine. “Return it” was the default, like rebooting windows.
So I decided to turn WEP on for him, since anyone who CAN, SHOULD.
As soon as I turned WEP on on the router, the laptop I was on gave me a classic BSOD. I rebooted, and it immediately went to BSOD again.
From another machine, I turned WEP off on the router, and rebooted the first laptop, and it worked fine. I turned WEP back on on the router, BSOD.
I left it off and told him not to turn it back on. He was just happy his router worked.
