Laptop & Pc wireless

[erica33]

I'm tring to network my pc, (WINXP Home), to my emachines laptop, (WINXP Home), and I am left clueless. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

first off, I'm trying to share the sbc yahoo dsl connection thru a
Linksys wireless g router. The desktop does fine with the connection, but the laptop will not recognize
the connection thru the router.
I'm new to this networking stuff, so please use lamens with me.
I know the router works fine, because its networked wirelessly right now to my daugters desktop pc with no problems.
Please help!

 

[Capricorn]

Does:
1. The laptop's wireless Ethernet card's utility (Linksys?) say you are connected. If not, check your SSID to make sure they match. (The desktop has it right.) Check your security settings to make sure they match. We talking same brand of networking cards? If you have a connection and it's still not working, try #2.
2. Wireless utility says you have a connection:
Are you using DHCP from the wireless G router to assign IP addresses? If yes, open a command prompt window, type IP config and see if you are getting a reasonable IP address. (The desktop has a valid IP address, so find out what it's using.) If you are not using DHCP, have you assigned an unused IP address in the same subnet. A good way to do this is to find out what the desktop has and bump the last number up or down by one. (Don't use 0 or 255 and generally stay away from 1.)
3. Can you ping the router and/or the desktop? Open a command prompt window and type "ping 192.168.1.1" (Substitute the IP address for your router in there, but that's the default IP address that Linksys' ships their routers with.) If you get a reply from the router and/or other machine, go to 4. If you get something else (request timed out, etc), you've likely got an IP address mismatch. (OR you really don't have a wireless link established.)
4. Try pinging ftp.x.org or www.google.com. If you get a reply you connection really ought to be good to go. If you get an unknown host error, you likely have bad or missing DNS servers in your configuration. Copy whatver servers your desktop is using if you are assigning IP addresses manually. They should have been assigned for you if you use DHCP. If they weren't, type ipconfig /renew into a command prompt window to get a new DHCP assigned address. If that still fails, check the DNS setting the router has.