First leap into networking!!

[Ausatco]

BB,

You're halfway there!!

It will simplify things now if you temporarily deactivate any software firewalls you have. Re-activate them when your network is working. If you then lose connectivity you know it's a firewall issue and not a network one.

I don't know what version of Windows you're running on your three machines - if you have XP on only one of them things will be easy (relatively speaking!) and if you have it on all, then easier again.

On a computer with XP, open the control panel, then Network Connections. In Network Tasks, click in "Set up a home or small office network"

If all your computers have XP, then you can exit the wizard and run it on each computer from Control Panel. For any computers running an earlier version of Windows you can either make a network set-up disk before exiting the wizard on an XP machine and use that, or use your XP installation disk - the wizard can be found under Perform Additional Tasks in the opening menu.

For all your computers you will be connecting to the internet through a hub (there's a selection to be made on one of the wizards pages). For each computer your connection to the Internet will be your wireless network - check or highlight that when asked. Also, when you get to it, tick the box that says Ignore network connections that are not available (or words to that effect)

You'll probably have to fiddle a bit, it's very hard to run a complete tutorial here, but this should get internet onto each machine.

Let us know when you're at this stage and we'll see if we can help with file and printer sharing.

(Useful tools are ipconfig and ping. Run them from a command window. (Start, Run, type "cmd" without quotes and OK. At the command line type ipconfig and Enter, or ping 192.168.0.1 (or whatever numbers) and Enter)

Ipconfig will tell you the address of the computer that it is run on, plus the address of the gateway. Run it on each computer and note the ip addresses. You should then be able to ping each address from each computer. If you can't there's something wrong with the network, even though the wireless signal is present, requiring further investigation.)

Let us know how you go. Good Luck

AA