[mkral]

I have an airport (the first white series one) wireless router & two macs on the network (a pismo & a g4 ibook). I've also had a windows computer on the network in the past (wife's work computer) via a PC card, worked great.

I am trying to add my brother-in-law's laptop to our network, but am having zero luck. He has a toshiba laptop, & is using a netgear MA521 PC Card (802.11b). The setup works great at his house, but I cannot get it to work on my network. I am running 40-bit encryption & when I turn off the encryption, his laptop works fine, but I don't want to leave my connection open, so I need to keep this on. His laptop is running windows 200 professional.

My network is closed & I added his MAC address to the list, although I also tried briefly to open the network.

If I click on the control panel for the Netgear wireless card on his laptop, it shows the connection to be good. It is sending data fine, but does not seem to be able to receive data & every time I try to open anything in Internet Explorer, I get an error message. We also have a printer set up on the network & his computer won't recognize the printer either (I have installed the driver)

Any tips/advice would be appreciated.

[ghporter]

It is most likely that the problem is in the WEP key. You see, unless you specify that the "network password" you supply is hexadecimal, the Mac and AirPort base will use it as simple text. This is NOT SO with ANY OTHER WIRELESS EQUIPMENT THAT I KNOW OF. By default any entry on non-Apple equipment is seen as hexadecimal.

Read this Apple Knowledge Base article for a bit more information on this issue. In short, if you manually convert the (ASCII) text of your password to hex-as referenced in the article-you can generate the hex equivalent of your password for the Netgear PC card. There are, as discussed in the article, some key length issues to keep in mind.

If your home network is not too big to hassle with it, you could generate a specific password/key that both works for the Netgear card and your network, and then just update the keys in everything. This would make sure that you had everything on the same sheet of music, so to speak, and everything should talk with WEP turned on.

[mkral]

Thanks! That did the trick.