I am hoping there is someone out there that can help me. I can work most things out but will admit to only knowing the very basics about networking.
My sister asked me to set up a wireless network for them since they had recently ordered ADSL, so I bought a ADSL Modem/Router (3Com 3CRWE754G72). This works fine, no problem, it connects directly via wire to a main desktop PC and connects to the internet.
The problem I have revolves my sisters laptop, she is a teacher and connects it to the School's wired network when at school. Over Christmas we connected to the home wireless network and it all worked fine. Then after Christmas she took the Laptop back to school and it refused to connect to the wired network. It would appear that simply connecting to the router wirelessly had reconfigured the PC's network settings totally. In my naiveity I thought Windows XP would have separate profiles for wireless and wired so it wouldn't be a problem (well it shows them separately on 'Network Connections' anyway).
I suspect this is something to do with the Modem/Router using a DHCP server and dynamically configuraing the IP address for the laptop and the school possibly having a fixed IP address (I don't know this for sure however). Surely this must be an extremely common scenario and Windows XP should allow this without having to manually configue each time?
After much tweaking the School finally managed to get the Laptop to reconnect to their network (they don't have a capable IT whiz) and I am loathed to fiddle without knowing what I am doing in case I mess things up again. Ideally though my sister would like to be able to do both with minimum bother, surely this is possible? Do I need to manually set IP addresses for the home network to emulate the school, in which case how do I do this? What happens if you connected wirelessly to another offsite wireless network (say in Starbucks) that used DHCP, would XP reconfigure it all again?
Any help would be most appreciated.
Thanks
Patrick Worcs, UK