Ah technology. Following up on last weeks Wi-Fi freakout by my WET11 Bridge, I am now back in business with the WET11 after a driver freak out with the SMC usb Wi-Fi device I purchased because I thought the WET11 was belly up. I think now that I simply needed to renew all my DHCP addresses and reset my WET11. Anyway, I now have MAC filtering turned on and have engaged WEP 64 bit (couldn't seem to do 128 bit under Windows XP?).

Speaking of Windows XP, it generally is going okay on my new Dell 600m. I have disabled some of the more obnoxious parts of this OS (Personal menus, Indexing, System restore). Probably will do more reg tweaking as time goes on. I did encounter my first head scratcher. I was trying to share some files between my Win2K PC and the Dell. For some reason the machines couldn't see each other on the net even though the group was the same and and file and print sharing was enabled. I finally punted and ran the Windows XP network wizard horror. God knows what this thing does but it trundled along for a little while and finally declared all was good. Well I could now share files etc. but it also left me with this strange thing called a Network Bridge which seemed to encapsulate all my networking settings. One of those Microsoft layers upon layers they are so fond of. I did a little googling on the subject and it seemed fairly harmless but I really didn't like how it obscured the basic network settings that I like to consult from time to time. To be fair, the Network Wizard probably got excited that I had two nics (Wi-Fi and Ethernet) and felt they "must" be bridged? Anyway, I decided to just delete the bridge and see if I could share files. I did and I can. So now my net settings are easily accessed and I can share files. Whew, I think these wizards just complicate things for people that know what and how to do things.