Crazy Wireless Problem

[claytonian]

Hey guys, my girlfriend got herself in a bind with the parents of her babysitter... she messed up their wireless network somehow... don't ask me how. They have a router that is secured by a password and a laptop. She took her laptop over to their house and connected to their internet... put in the password, etc. She says that when she put the password in a bunch of stuff popped up and she just clicked "yes", "next", "yes"... like any person that doesn't know what they're doing would do. Now, whenever the parents try to connect to their internet, they can't. They can no longer see their network, they can only see "Meagan-PC", the name of her computer. On my girlfriend's laptop however, she can connect to their network. Another mystery, their network is no longer secured. Do you have any idea how to fix this or what is going on? She has to fix this before they get back... any help would be awesome. Thanks.

 

[eibgrad]

Hmm, any chance she's introduced malware to that machine (and by extension, the network)? Given how little you know about what actually happened, that's the first thing I would check. Frankly, I'm suspicious that she JUST entered the password and all these problems just started happening. Doesn’t sound plausible.

 

[claytonian]

tbh, i HIGHLY doubt that. The only thing she uses her computer for is farmville and Word. she decided that she wasn't going to read anything the popped up and just clicked through it. New developments however: The wireless light on the router isn't on. What I'm assuming she did was click something that turned her computer into a hotspot/access point instead of leaving that up to the router. she can't connect to the router from her laptop like I first said... I've seen this sort of thing happen before at my school, where teacher's laptops will be gateways to the internet instead of the router, but you can never connect to them (the tries always fail)... so I don't know what the hell to do.

 

[eibgrad]

There's NO WAY that anything she did on her laptop could reconfigure the router, turn off it's LED, etc. NO WAY.

Did you try rebooting the router?