[mr. burns]

for some reason when i enabled the WEP security on our airport express, my sister's vista computer 'can't find the network' when she puts in the password, while my mom's imac can connect.

is there some goofy security feature my sister has to tweak in order to be able to connect? i don't get it. even when i changed to the WPA[sp] security type, it would just hang there while trying to connect.

if i disable the security in the airport network, she can connect fine.

[ghporter]

When you entered the WEP password/key, how did you do it? Unlike everyone else in the business, Apple's network hardware interprets WEP key inputs as plain text by default-everyone else interprets it as hexadecimal by default. So if you just gave your sister the precise keystrokes you used to set up the AirPort Express, she would NOT get the she needs.

It sounds very much like you have done just that, so here's how to fix it. You'll have to convert your WEP password to its hex equivalent (this is what the AirPort firmware does). Look up each character on this handy ASCII-to-Hex table, copy the hex value for it, and then move on to the next character. There is a limit to the number of characters to use for a WEP key, based on which key length you've selected; a maximum of 10 characters for 64-bit or 13 characters for 128-bit, so the AirPort device only converts that many characters and ignores the rest.

With all that said, WEP is poo on a stick. It is trivial to break its encryption, and so it's worse than no security at all-you get a nice warm feeling for having done something, but the emperor has no clothes... Dumping WEP is a great idea. As for WPA, there are no real tricks, just some terminology to know. What Apple calls "WPA-Personal" is also known as "WPA with PSK and TKIP" . PSK means "pre-shared key", and TKIP means "temporal key integrity protocol" and you don't need to know any more about it than that! This is as opposed to using a version with AES, which takes a server to manage. So if you select "WPA-Personal" for your AirPort Extreme and give it a nice long passphrase, you will have good security and your sister's Vista computer should connect. If you're already using WPA-Personal, then get back with us on it and we'll see what else is not working...

[seanc]

I can't remember where I read it, but it has worked a couple of times, try putting a $ in front of the passphrase.
Another option is to set up your network as a preferred network in Vista and then 'repair' the connection to see if it will connect.
Vista does seem quite flakey about networking, I can't wait for the proper release of SP1, the release candidate I have installed at work seems very promising.

I also agree with ghporter, if you can use it, use WPA, it's a lot more secure than WEP is.

[mr. burns]

thanks for the in depth response. is there any reason why she couldn't connect when i switched it to WPA? it wouldn't give her an instant can't connect error, it would just hang there trying to connect and never doing it. do i have to make the password a certain number of characters?

[mr. burns]

hmmm, nevermind. i changed the airport to a WPA-2 personal network and was able to get the vista computer to connect. yay. i had to make sure the vista computer knew it was connecting to a WPA-2 network in the properties. thanks for the help.