My partner and I got WildBlue high speed Internet for my birthday. WildBlue is a satellite based network that gives us a 54 MBPS connection vs. our previous 44 KBPS dial-up connection. We live in the middle of nowhere and this upgrade was long overdue. It’s been less than 24 hours and our little cabin in the woods is turning into a high powered, high speed hub of wireless connected desktops, laptops, printers, and even a gaming system, just for fun.
Our WildBlue equipment installer knew a lot about the dish side of the job but wasn’t network or computer savvy. I thought I was going to have to wait for my long time friend and resident computer geek to come and hook up my home. But I was restless and I couldn’t wait. It was my birthday and I wanted a wired home. I set out to set up my home armed with a cup of coffee and dressed in my warmest pj’s.
This seemed easy enough. First I had to get the satellite cord over to the computer hub. The installer did a good job of feeding it through my window and he made sure to give me enough cord to stretch all the way across my small home. I fed the cord under my living room carpet and secured it down with black tape at the edges. The modem was the largest I’d ever worked with but I found a place between the couch and the wall where it was neatly hidden. I labeled the cords and banded them together with a twisty tie so they would stay organized over the long run.
Then I had to set up the wireless connection. Luckily I hadn’t thrown away my unused Linksys Wireless Broadband Router, and although I hadn’t used it in over 4 years, it worked without a problem. I tucked the router next to the modem and labeled and organized the cords as I had done with the modem. After plugging the router into the power source and attaching the Ethernet cable from my modem to the back of the router, I had a wireless connection.
Next I took a 25 foot RBG cable that my partner bought at Radio Shack and fed it under the carpet from our living room media computer (an old Everex Impact) up to our new 32 inch LCD TV. The Everex didn’t have a wireless card built in, so I dug out an old Linksys card that I had from a laptop that was no longer around and voilà! The old girl was streaming wireless Internet on to our 32 inch LCD TV. I went to Crucial.com and updated the memory to pull what I could out of the Everex and then surfed over to my Netflix account and downloaded their movie viewer.
To include my laptop in the new household network, I made the Linksys network my preferred Internet connection and deleted my old dial up connection. Then, to make my laptop run a little faster and to give my partner full access to our music collection, I hooked my laptop up to the Everex with a USB to USB transfer wire and moved the files to the shared computer.
My next move was to register my Wii with the new wireless network that I had created. I’ll admit, I was expecting this part to take the longest but I was pleasantly surprised that there was no product registration or questionnaires for me to fill out. I turned on the Wii, told it to look for the wireless signal from my Options menu, and was playing Mario Kart with people from all over the world before I knew it.
Within the time it took to drink my traditional 2 cups of morning coffee I had completely outfitted my home with a wireless network and transformed an old computer into a media hub for movies, music, and games.