At home, we have a wired network. It wasn’t done by me though, so I’m not exactly sure why it was set up as it is. We have a cable modem, which is connected to our main pc (called MAIN). MAIN is then connected to a switch (a Mercury 10/100Mbps Fast Ethernet Switch – that’s what the box says), which is in the attic. Three other PCs (RACH, EMMA and NIKKI) are then connected to the switch. This works fine for Internet and file sharing.
However, I’ve just bought two IBM Thinkpad X31s – one to replace EMMA and one to become JENNIE. They don’t have whatever it is that would make them able to connect to a wireless network, but apparently I can buy something to sort that out. Is this a PCMCIA card? There’s a slot for one of those (type I or type II on the side of them). I’ve found one on Ebuyer.com – the ‘Ebuyer 11Mbps Wireless LAN CardBus PC Card LAN Adapter (802.11b)’ (quick find code 52909). Is that what I need to buy?
Then I need to add wireless capabilities to the wired network. Since the switch is in the attic (and I’m too short to climb up there!), I’d really like to add the wireless network where the old EMMA is connected, since new EMMA won’t need the network cable that’s already been put in. Is this ok? I don’t know what I need to buy either – do I need a wireless access point or a wireless router? The box for the switch says that I can add in a wireless access point, but that also says I should use a broadband router, which I don’t have.
I’m hoping to do all this spending the least amount of money possible. There’s also the possibility of making all the computers wireless in the future, but I can’t afford to replace network cards (or whatever I’d need to replace) in all the PCs at the moment, so I need to run wired and wireless parallel for now I’m pretty good at following instructions, but I don’t have the knowledge to be doing anything too complicated! Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Rachel.
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