Facilitating WiFi in a Laptop .......................................................................
Almost every new laptop now includes a wireless transceiver built in to the
motherboard or attached to it through a special port in the case. However, if
your laptop does not include wireless facilities or if its standard is outdated,
you can easily upgrade and update.Sans current facilities ........................................................................
The following options are for adding wireless to a laptop that does not have
any existing facilities.Chapter 14: Feeling Up In the Air 213
Staying beneath the radar
Right out of the box, most WiFi systems are con-
figured to be open to any machine that speaks
the same language, which could include your
next-door neighbors and some guy in a car
down the road. It takes a few extra steps to
make it difficult — but not impossible — for
someone else to sneak into your wireless cloud.The basic way to lock up a home network is to
instruct the router to block any computers not
on a list you provide; this is called MAC (media
access control) filtering.This is based on the
unique identification number stored on network
adapter cards; the ID is randomly generated,
and it is highly unlikely to find identical sets.
Following the instructions provided by your
router maker, enter the MAC address for each
device in your wireless network into the
memory of the router, and it will block foreign
access.
You can look up the MAC address of a computer
running Windows XP with these steps:1.Go to Start➪Run.2.Type CMDand click OK to go to the operating
system that percolates beneath Windows.
3.When you see the command prompt, type
IPCONFIG/ALLand press the Enter key.You’ll find all sorts of information about your net-
work adapter, but the one you are looking for is
called Physical Address. Herein is the MAC
address, which will look something like this:
00-88-AD-78-35-97.
If you have both an Ethernet adapter and a wire-
less card in your machine, you’ll find a listing for
both the wired adapter and wireless card; the
one you want is for the WiFi adapter and is
listed as the Ethernet adapter Wireless Network
Connection. As I indicated, MAC filtering is not
perfect; a moderately talented sneak can often
find a way to fool the router. Be sure to keep
your firewall and antivirus hardware and soft-
ware current.