Wireless Configuration

I have been trying to use the Toshiba Wireless LAN PCI card in my laptop to
connect with my USR router. It is security enabled and has a pass phrase.
When I put the pass prase in where it asks for a network key I get a message
"Wireless Configuration- the network password needs to be 40 bits or 10 bit
depending on your network configuration. This can be entered as 5 or 13 ascii
characters or 10 or 26 hexadecimal characters." I have searched in vain
trying find out how to use the internal adapter, without sucess. Actually for
the past several years I simply abandoned the internal card and used on
supplied by USR- bypassing the windows configuration. I just put a new hard
drive in the computer however, and am putting it all back together and
thought I would take a stab at making the internal LAN card work. My Vista
laptop detected the router with no problems and the current pass phrase
worked with it. So I'm thinking it's an XP driver utility type problem in my
old XP laptop. Any suggestions?

low tech T

low tech T wrote:
> I have been trying to use the Toshiba Wireless LAN PCI card in my laptop to
> connect with my USR router. It is security enabled and has a pass phrase.
> When I put the pass prase in where it asks for a network key I get a message
> "Wireless Configuration- the network password needs to be 40 bits or 10 bit
> depending on your network configuration. This can be entered as 5 or 13 ascii
> characters or 10 or 26 hexadecimal characters." I have searched in vain
> trying find out how to use the internal adapter, without sucess. Actually for
> the past several years I simply abandoned the internal card and used on
> supplied by USR- bypassing the windows configuration. I just put a new hard
> drive in the computer however, and am putting it all back together and
> thought I would take a stab at making the internal LAN card work. My Vista
> laptop detected the router with no problems and the current pass phrase
> worked with it. So I'm thinking it's an XP driver utility type problem in my
> old XP laptop. Any suggestions?

When you get a message like the one you received, it means that you are
using WEP encryption. This is crackable using tools readily available
on the Internet and you should use WPA2 (preferably) or WPA. You would
use the "PSK" or "Personal" mode of either WPA2 or WPA.

The reason for the message is that the "real" WEP key is the string of
HEX characters, and not the password that you chose. Your router uses
an algorithm to generate the HEX key from the password; Windows uses an
algorithm to generate a HEX key from a password. It may not be (and
often is not) the same algorithm.

If you insist on using WEP, enter the HEX key when asked. If you don't
know the HEX key, log on to your router's configuration utility and go
to the wireless security section. You should see both your password (in
clear) and its corresponding HEX key. But you should really upgrade
your security.

--
Lem -- MS-MVP

To the moon and back with 2K words of RAM and 36K words of ROM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer
http://history.nasa.gov/afj/compessay.htm

Lem