TPG has been raved about in local computer and financial magazines as Australia's best internet provider. So finally I thought I should give them a go. Basically we were fed up with running out of gigabytes with the national carrier Big Pond (due to my son's never ending YouTube and downloading of free games and patches). Plus I have heavy internet usage as well.
For the same money we spent with Big Pond each month, TPG is now giving us double the speed, and triple the amount of gigabytes we can download each month.
The ADSL2+/ADSL Dynalink modem wireless router they provided is awesomely powerful, and finally we can get the same powerful transmission speeds upstairs as we have enjoyed downstairs near the router.
The installation instructions from TPG were excellent and everything was quickly set up and working as a wireless network with no security. But when we tried to put a 128 bit WEP key onto the network, some real fun began. Because the Netgear WG111V2 USB wireless adapters had been used previously for the Big Pond setup, they did not want to talk at all to the new TPG modem.
After a couple of hours of profanity-laden frustration, we finally realised that what was holding us back was the Netgear software running at PC startup, whereas we needed Windows XP to do all of the wireless network connection at start up.
So what had to be done was Start / Run / msconfig
then go to the start up items, and untick the Netgear adapter software.
Before this though, we had to use the ethernet connection from the laptop to the modem to download the latest Netgear software, and put it onto a USB stick so we could then do each adapter with its computer. First we had to uninstall any old Netgear software that was on the computers from the Big Pond days.
We then had to take the new install from USB stick all the way through to plugging in the Netgear adapter and giving it the 26 character 128 bit WEP key. (Eg. Do not stop at the Windows Zero option, but keep going right until the very end of the Netgear installation program. Also do each adapter onto its own PC).
We also had to play around with the Properites (Start / Control Panel / Network Connections then right click Properties) and make sure under the "Wireless" tab that we had "Use Windows to configure my wireless network settings" ticked, and that we removed any preferred networks that were on this panel.
With the laptop, there was no drama at all, and its wireless card found the network easily, and once we entered the WEP key in the first time everything was go.
So take if from me, you should really check out TPG.
There is an iframe to do it right now at the start of this blog post, or just go directly to http://www.tpg.com.au/ .
Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi
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