Made a big mistake and need help fast

[JasonWie]

This Christmas my daughter, who is 12 got her 1st laptop. Me being a good Father was worried about the masses of uncharming information on the internet, and her curiosity. So, I tried to set up a network so I could access her computer from mine whenever I wanted to check on things. Not thinking that it would have been easier to setup parental controls, but me not really understanding networks, I messed something up with our wireless network settings, because after I did that her wireless capability was always on off, and she had to trouble shoot her connection every time she got online. So, last night I tried messing with it to see if I could fix it again and now I really botched something, because now her laptop wont let her even on our wireless network at all. When I try to connect her laptop to out network it says, "the settings saved on this computer for the network do not match the requirements of the network." Is there any way I can reset the network and get a new password and everything, or is there anything I can do with guidance to fix this problem??? I know tonight she's going to want to go online, and now her computer wont allow her on our connection. Can someone please help?

 

[RealBeast]

Not knowing exactly what you did makes it difficult to recommend a fix.

My approach would be to set the entire network up all over, use a new IP address range (say a gateway of 192.168.2.1 instead of .1.1 or .0.1 and give the DHCP an assignable range of 192.168.2.2 to .128, subnet mask 255.255.255.0), change the SSID and security key. Then turn on all of your machines, make sure that they all automatically obtain an IP address and enter the security key after detecting the "new" network.

Rather than a spying approach, which doesn't really prevent the problem up front like you really want, you can use a number of methods to block her access to bad sites. I like to use a combination of a hosts file on the child's computer (http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm), the parental controls in her OS and the domain access controls of your router.