Right now all computers connected directly to your router using regular network cables have access to the Internet.

The next step is to allow your computers using wireless connection to access your network and thus have access to the Internet.

Your wireless network will now be listed on the available networks list of all computers that have a wireless network card within the range of your broadband router.

So all you need to do is to click the wireless network icon available on the task bar or double click your wireless connection on Network Connections (Start, Control Panel) to see a list of wireless networks available. As you can see on Figure 18, we have several networks available (all from our neighbors, thus the importance of enabling data encryption). All we need to do is to double click our network (MyHome in our case).

click to enlarge
Figure 18: Wireless networks available.

After double-clicking your network, Windows will ask you the network encryption key (the 26-character string you wrote down, remember?), see Figure 19. You will need to repeat it.

Figure 19: Enter the encryption key (“password”) to have access to your wireless network.

After clicking Ok, your network status will be listed as “Acquiring Network Address” and then it will change to “Connected”, see Figure 20.

click to enlarge
Figure 20: Now you are now connected to your network.

If you pass your mouse over the wireless icon on the Windows task bar you will now see “Connected” and the signal strength, see Figure 21.

Figure 21: Our laptop is now connected to our wireless network.

Your wireless network is now 100% operational and protected. As a last step you may want to read our How to Share Folders and Printers on Your Network tutorial in order to learn how to share files and printers between the computers on your network. Don’t be afraid, encryption is enabled so no one outside your network will have access to your data, even your snoopy neighbor.

On the next page we will talk about some advanced configurations that we think are interesting even to the average home user.