Networking Old Desktop to Wireless Router

twinslove2

Honorable
Jan 14, 2014
1
0
10,510
My boss gave me an old Dell Desktop (3.5 yrs old). I took my blue ethernet cable and attached the desktop to my D-Link dir 645 wireless router, and the internet went down for my entire home when it was working minutes beforehand. After some research through my phone, I was able to plug in an IP address for IPV4, which brought the internet back up for the desktop and wireless laptop. 4 questions: when I connected the blue cord, it set me up to a "network 2" with a password, but I want to be set up to the family network. How to I know I am set up to the right network? Originally I think I was using an IPv6 address so how do I get back the original settings? How do I know if I am secure or not on my network? My laptop now says that my family network is "public" when I know people have to plug in a password to join, but I didn't have to do it on the desktop. And last question, is there a way to delete an entire network and start from scratch again? We have too made gadgets and it has gotten confusing to me! Thank you!!!
 

RealBeast

Titan
Moderator
When you attached the Dell, it is likely that it had a static address set that was not in your network range. You don't mention an OS, so I will guess that a 3.5 year old Dell has Windows 7 installed -- go into your network control panel and change the public network to a home network. You can do that on all computers that are set to public network.

All of your computers will use IPv4 addresses for their internal LAN connections. The only thing that you need IPv6 for really is to use a homegroup.

Unless you have a reason to do otherwise I would allow all the devices to automatically obtain IP addresses from your router DHCP service. Much easier than using static addresses with all the new devices coming every year.

If you use WPA2 security with a good password and have WPS disabled, your network should be fine -- wireless is the biggest point of weakness for home networks.