could NOT enable WEP on XP (home) (1 Viewer)

hi all -

i recently setup a wireless network on a couple of pc's in my house (win98se) with 128bit WEP encryption. it worked perfectly.

but when i tried to add another pc (xp) it would not work for the life of me.

i spent about 4 hours trying various iterations. i did just about everything i could think of. i reinstalled drivers, verified via device manager, changed the bit encryption, blah blah blah.

my network icon shows that i have a solid connection to my network, but i couldn't get anything (internet, etc.) to work on the xp box.

i finally diabled WEP (for now) but it's buggin' me.

any ideas? let me know if you need more info.

thx,

ted

Is every item in your wireless network (access point, receivers, whether USB or notebook card) made by the same company? Different manufacturers implement WEP differently, and if you try to mix-'n'-match equipment, it may not work. (So much for WiFi "compatibility"!)

M.

yup, i actually have two different transmitter thingy's (wap?). one by linksys and one by hp. both of the antenna thingy's that i attach to each pc are by linksys.

my original config worked fine. when this started having problems i used the linksys transmitter.

no luck either way. i ended going back to the hp cuz it has a built in router which my girlfriend uses.

i hear ya, but somehow i don't think that's the problem - especially since it works okay on the 98 boxes.

of course i'm not sure...

Some devices use "pass phrases" to generate their WEP keys and these Pass phrase generators are not all compatible. If you manually copy the actual keys, however, they will work together.

so you're saying to manually copy over the hex (or binary or whatever it is) stuff manually?

cool...i'll give it a shot. thx!

Ding Ding Ding, I think we may have a winner. The whole pass phrase thing is a joke. I know that the manufacurers put it in there to possibly make it easier to secure your system but many do not mention that the system is not part of the standard and is not compatible from one device to another. Even the way the text boxes are implemented sucks since some have one big box you type the whole key into and others have a bunch of boxes that 2 characters of the key go into each one etc.