How To: Make a Wireless Home with Your Treo

[lulugirl896]

Even though this goes a bit beyond just the Treo, here is a detailed guide on how I not only made my home wireless, but made my Treo a pivotal piece of the setup:

I decided that the move to the new house would be an excellent time to experiment with wireless options in the home. I have finally set up our home so that we have;



1. Verizon DSL Hi-Speed Wireless Internet connection

2. Laptop using the wireless connection

3. His computer using the wireless connection

4. Her computer using the wireless connection

5. A home network so that all the computers have access to each other

6. My Treo 650 with access to use the hi-speed wireless connection while at home, and access to join the network and access files on all the computers.



For the moderately literate computer user, I am going to explain exactly how I was finally able to accomplish this, and what the reasons were to do it.



In our old home we had AT&T DSL- and it sucked. It was off nearly more than it was on, and it just wasn’t that fast. When we moved, we took the opportunity to switch to Verizon. To do this, we signed up online for Verizon DSL in conjunction with our new telephone service.

Next, we realized that even though the new house is 3 stories, there are only 2 phone jacks in the entire house... and they are both right next to each other in the living room. We didn't want to bother with re-wiring the whole house, so we decided to take advantage of the Linksys wireless router that Verizon offered as part of the DSL service. We purchased a wireless-G PCI adapter and installed it into His computer. (Her computer was not yet purchased at the time).

Activating the wireless connection on his computer was as simple as running the Verizon installation CD. The CD had a step-by-step tutorial which could not be easier to follow.



Next, I decided to purchase an inexpensive laptop that we could use all over the house (Our home office is on the 3rd floor). I went onto Ebay and literally searched the terms wireless laptop. I found a used Compaq Presario 1245 in excellent working condition with a wireless network card installed for just $185. The laptop runs Windows 98, with 160MB RAM and 3 GB of storage. This was perfect for us, as the purpose of the laptop is purely for surfing the internet (to look up a recipe in the kitchen, look up a motorcycle part in the garage, or voice an opinion on a network page while watching the news in the den or lining room). Once the laptop arrived, I found that the moment I turned it on, it connected to the internet. Perfect.



A few days later my new pc (Her computer) arrived. At this point we already knew the drill so we purchased another PCI card and installed it. The computer connected to the internet with no problem.



With everything up and running, I started to think more about what I really wanted to be able to accomplish. Our laptop is very low on memory- so if we saw something interesting on the web that we wanted to download or keep, we’d have to email it to ourselves and then delete it from the laptop. It worked, but I knew there had to be a more sophisticated way. In addition, I wanted to be able to access all my files from our laptop, in case I needed to quickly reference something from another room or floor.



So I decided that a home network was the best way to go. I must say that the biggest problem I had was with her computer- and this ended up being due to the installed Norton’s Anti-Virus. So, if you are going to set this up, make sure you check your firewall settings. In mine, I had to include the network address (IP) as a trusted zone for her computer to be able to access and be accessed by the other computers on the network. I spent hours trying to figure out why I could “see” her computer listed on the laptop and on his computer but could not access it. I couldn’t even “see” the other computers on her computer until I figured out that Norton’s was the problem.



Use the Home Network wizard in the control panel to create a network, and be sure to name it something easy for you to remember. I ran the wizard on both computers- for some reason the laptop was just able to pick up the network from “Network Neighborhood”.



With that accomplished, of course I decided I wanted to include my Treo in the fun. I knew the functionality would be limited, but I wanted to be able to;

-access files on all 3 computers

-utilize the high speed connection in the house.

I accomplished these (and more) with 3 applications.



Softick PPP (www.softick.com)

This application enables you to use PPP protocol to create a connection with your PC’s internet connection. I added the Bluetooth connectivity, and I am able to use my Bluetooth to connect to my PC from anywhere in the house and have a blazingly fast internet connection on my Treo. Alone, this is not so overwhelming, but this is important for the next item:



Wi-File Pro (www.handshigh.com)

With this application, I can connect to my home network shares (I.e. the files I have chosen to share with the network users). Before opening Wi-File, I open my preferences and pull up the connection I created with Softick PPP and connect. Then I open Wi-File and connect to the Windows shares I want to access on her computer, his computer or the laptop. The only thing to note is that I had to manually enter the IP address of each computer to be able to browse the shares. Clicking on the ‘browse’ button did not show my home network.



Win-Hand Anywhere (www.win-hand.com)

I installed this program on both his and her computers. I purchased 6 months but did not include file transfer. I figured that with this running, if I need something from my computer, all I need to do is pull up the email program and send it as an attachment to an email address I can retrieve from my Treo or outside computer. This was not really crucial to the whole network, file sharing theme, but in a way it is. Now I can also access files from my Treo when I am outside the house’s wireless network

[joe55555]

Thanks for all the info, this will help me alot.

[lulugirl896]

Thanks for the feedback, 5Joe! Let us know if you had to do anything differently in your feedback...
That'll help the next person trying it!

[rockysjewel]

thank you so much lulugirl for taking the time to explain all that. Will make my tranistion run much smoother!! You are a gem !

[lulugirl896]

Originally Posted by rockysjewel

You are a gem !

And you are a jewel! :tongue:

[italio]

Hey! Great post, very informative. I will be upgrading to total wireless in the near future and cant wait to use my Treo! Checked out your blog and liked your subway peeves....heres a pretty cool subway mashup with googleMaps...sweet!


http://www.onnyturf.com/subwaymap.php

[lulugirl896]

Thanks for checking out my blog! I looked at the GoogleMap in your post and that's really cool- especially the hybrid option!