Our choice to go with the D-Link AP (Access Point) was based on three things.

1. Price: Let's face it, going wireless can run you some fat cash. So our primary objective was to do this as painlessly as possible.
2. Reliability: Ok, so it's not Cisco, but D-Link has been coming through again and again, delivering a respectable value priced product.
3. Availability: These things are flying off the shelf faster then they can make them. We were lucky enough to get the last one. In fact the only wireless PCMCIA cards we could find were from 3com. Fine by me, we'll just see how standard this whole 802.11b thing is. Note: This is a wireless access point. You will still need a cable/dsl router to share IP address. As there are numerous accounts on how to setup a cable/dsl router I will skip that part and get on with the good stuff.

After ravaging like a six year-old at Christmas we got the thing out of the box. The first thing we noticed is that this thing is small. Almost tiny.

I glanced at the quick installation manual to make sure I didn't accidentally start broadcasting on some restricted FAA frequency...and we we're off.

Step 1. Install wireless NIC (Network Interface Card) on your PC. Set IP address to 192.168.0.1 with a subnet of 255.255.255.0
Step 2. Plug in AP's power adapter.
Step 3. Install D-link AP Driver software on same PC. Run AP Manager.
Step 4. Cry like a baby after spending two hours trying to figure out why it won't see the damn AP!!!

D-link uses two setting to configure the wireless portion of the card: Channel and SSID. 3Com uses only one, the Wireless LAN Service Area. After many calls back and forth with D-Link and 3Com we finally figured out that 3Com's Wireless LAN Service Area and D-Link's SSID are one in the same. The 3Com does not support Channels. And as we found out, it doesn't seem to need to. We set the Wireless LAN Service Area to "ANY" (case sensitive) and BAM! Lights started flashing, packets started flying.

C'mon everyone, group hug.

Step 6. Using a Cat-5 cable, plug the D-link into an open port on your networks hub/switch/router. It was very nice to see that I could use a standard cable and didn't have to rummage around for a crossover cable. Also, the AP is set to pick up an IP from DHCP if you have it enabled.

After perfecting the method on his system, wife Danielle's laptop was a breeze. Junior's desktop required a PCI adapter for the PCMCIA card, but that was no big sweat.

Soon the whole house was quietly tapping away on their computers, each in their own room and nary a cable in sight.

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