How do I set a password for wireless network access

[avjlm]

My son now has his own laptop (thank you Santa...) and I need to control his access to the internet. How can I set up a password to control access to our home wireless network? I have just noticed that our wireless network is not showing as secure.

 

[Saga Lout]

Hello and welcome to Tom's Hardware Forums. Good luck controlling his access to the Net - he'll probably end up barring you from websites. Here's how to find and alter your wireless security and along the way, hide the SSID.

Connect your router to the computer with the cable that came with the router then go Start then Run in XP - Windows key plus R in Vista and Windows 7 - then type in the following, including all the spaces:-

cmd /k ipconfig /all

then press Enter and from the black form that shows up, take a note of the numeric code beside the Default Gateway icon - something like 192.168.0.1.

Type exit to close the black form.

Open Internet Explorer and enter that code into the URL address bar as though it was a website. You're then at the login page to the router's settings utility and admin will usually be the login with either admin or password as the password.

If you're in, seek out Wireless and then Security and take a note of the key. Sometimes it may be a passphrase, some a simple set of letters and others a hexadecimal code. You also may as well note which level of security it is - WEP, WPA or WPA/PSK 2 and then either AES or TKIP. Your computer will already know this but it's handy information to store. Note also that hexadecimal only contains numbers from zero to 9 and letters a to f so there's no confusion of I and O with 1 and 0.

It's best to keep a note of that security key in your Documents folder and also outside the computer.