Setting Up Wireless Card

Setting up Wireless card could be a hard job. Learn all the secrets of a wireless PC card! This procedure is for Windows Vista. You can use it, no matter which kind of WLAN card you have.

Parameters of the WLAN card have to match with parameters on your Access Point or Broadband Wireless Router.

Open your "Network and Sharing Center". You could open it in a two ways:
- On "Notification Area" on the right side of your Taskbar make a right click on Network icon and choose "Network and Sharing Center”.
- When you click on the Start button (on the left side of your Taskbar), you can choose "Network". On Network you can click on "Network and Sharing Center". When you are on your "Network and Sharing Center", you could open a "Connect to a network".

On "Connect to a network" from the drop down menu "Select a network to connect to" choose "Wireless" and you will see the names (SSIDs) of all the wireless networks which your PC see.

You can choose one of these networks to connect and you will get the option to fill "Security key or passphrase".

There is a catch, if you have setup your wireless router with the option "Hide SSID", the router will not broadcast the SSID and you will not see this network on the list in "Connect to a network" window.

My recommendation is to enable "Hide SSID", because it will put your security on a higher level. So in this case, you will need Setting up Wireless card in a slightly different way. From the "Network and Sharing Center" window, you need to click on "Manage Wireless Networks".

On the "Manage Wireless Networks" window click on Green cross "Add" icon, then you will get the window "Manually connect to a wireless network".

On the window "Manually connect to a wireless network" choose a "Manually create a network profile" option and you will finally get the window for Setting up Wireless card.

On "Network name" choose the SSID or network name which is configured on your wireless router. From the "Security type" choose the type of security which are you using on your wireless network. There are following options:
- No authentication (Open)
- WEP
- WPA2-Personal
- WPA-Personal
- WPA2-Enterprise
- WPA-Enterprise
- 802.1x

On "Encryption type" there are options according to the selection of "Security type". If you have chosen WEP, encryption WEP will be available. If you choose one of the four WPA types, you will have the two encryption types: AES and TKIP.

On the "Security Key/Passphrase" you need to enter the same key or the passphrase which is configured on wireless router on which you are connecting.

The best way is to check the "Start this connection automatically" option, if you will connect more than once on this wireless network. If you are connecting to your wireless router which has enabled "Hide SSID" option, you will need to check the "Connect even if the network is not broadcasting". This option is not wise to check, if you are connecting to the same public network like WiFi hotspot.

I need to mention one very important thing in the end, do not use WEP security and use WPA instead. Why is that you can check on WEP vs WPA and WEP key find in less than a minute.

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