Making Sense of Wireless Connection Problem

[stephentony]

I have 3 computers in my home. An iMac that has a Linksys WRT54G wireless router connected to it and a wireless connection that I am able to make to that network using a laptop running Windows XP. I have the 3rd machine which is about 8 years old. It's a Pentium II 450, 384 MB of memory running Windows XP with 3 open PCI slots. I found that the PCI version I have is 2.1. So I was able to purchase an older US Robotics 802.11g PCI card that is PCI 2.1 compliant. I installed the card and drivers and I get zip. NOTHING! I've almost had it with this machine. I had to learn the hard way that installing wireless cards that required PCI 2.2 and above would not work. I tried a USB wireless adapter with no luck either. The signal is very strong because my laptop is sitting along side the desktop and gets a booming signal. Any ideas because I feel like I've exausted every option in getting this desktop hooked up for internet access.

[Ob1]

does the wireless device show up in device manager, and are you able to install the drivers for it?

is there any wireless encryption on your wireless router? if so remove it temporarily and see if you can get the desktop connected with no encryption. also check and see if there is any wireless mac filtering on the wireless router. third, check and make sure your router is issuing out enough ip addresses for all your devices on the network.

[stephentony]

Ob1 you nailed it! As soon as I read "mac filtering" I remembered that I had it on when I first set the router up. Signed in, checked the settings and sure enough. I added the mac address from the 3rd computer and all systems were go. Thank you so much for your advice.