Member Avatar for mmorrison

Hello Collective Wisdom,

I'm new here, and hoping people might have some ideas for me. My co-op building has a home network spread over 3 floors + basement, supporting at 1/2 dozen (+) computers. I'm the default IT person, computer-literate but not a lot of hands-on experience with networking. ISP is ComCast, via cable.

When the previous cable modem got flaky & died, we went to BestBuy and grabbed a LinkSys WCG200 Wireless-G Cable Gateway. I read the instructions, unplugged the old unit and plugged in the new one. After registering the new unit's MAC address with our ISP (ComCast), I then asked my Mac OSX laptop to find & connect to the network. And I'm on. Did the same thing with the other Mac OSX laptop in the house, it worked too.

THEN I sat down at two different WindowsXP machines, and came to a screeching halt. After spending about 6 hours trying to get the WindowsXP machines online, I'm about to take after them with a baseball bat. I've been online with LinkSys live chat support. After 4 straight hours this afternoon, I gave up on it for the day, but my housemates really need their internet access back, and running Ethernet cables to most of them isn't practical.

So two questions:

1) Has anybody got experience getting WindowsXP machines connected (wirelessly) with this LinkSys WCG200 unit? That might be able to tell me what I've overlooked?

And 2) Let's pretend I *didn't* already buy this LinkSys unit. What do you think's the best choice for a cable modem? Should I separate out the wireless feature and use a different cable modem *plus* our older Airport unit? I unplugged the Airport access point because the WCG200 has wireless capabilities, but maybe I should go back to separate units for separate functions, as easier to troubleshoot &/or upgrade later.

Thanks in advance, and looking forward to your replies.

Marcia Morrison
in Salem, Massachusetts

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by sheyral
Member Avatar for sheyral

if 2 other pcs were able to connect to the linksys network, i believe the problem is not cased by the router(wcg200 is both modem and router).

make sure your ssid or wireless network name is unique. you might be using the default ssid from linksys. and try to erase all the preerred networks in the xp pcs.

other reason for this problem is, both the builtin wireless utility of xp and the wlan utility of the adapter installed on the pcs are running at the same time... make sure you disabled one of these utilities.

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