Getting Wi-Fi Working

One of the first things I tried to do with my Elonex OneT+ was to connect to the internet over a wireless network. This looked straightforward enough: there’s a ‘Wi-Fi’ icon on the ‘Internet’ tab, and the wireless manager looks fairly intuitive.

When opened, the wireless manager performs a search for available networks automatically. My network was listed, and when I double-clicked it I was presented with a settings window. The only setting I altered was the WPA key. After clicking OK, a message appeared next to the network to say that it was connecting, then acquiring an IP address, followed by a message to say the IP was invalid.

At first I suspected a problem with DHCP, so I disabled it and chose a static IP address well out of the way of anything else on the network. I did this by clicking on the network, then ‘WLAN Setting’. The wireless manager told me I had a connection, but when I opened the web browser nothing would load. I never did find out why, but I think that I’d either entered an incorrect address for the DNS server (or that this hadn’t been picked up automatically), or had entered the wrong broadcast IP (the instructions for this were a little vague, “usually the same like your IP but with 255 as last number”.

At this point, I decided to Google the subject, and found several people with the same problem. The advice they were given was to plug into a wired connection and run Software Installer to get the latest updates. The laptop picked up the wired network immediately and I downloaded the updates. This took all of 5 minutes, and after a reboot I was able to connect wirelessly straight away.

I’ve now tried connecting to two wireless networks, both using DHCP and WPA-PSK encryption, and apart from a few signal drop-outs the Wi-Fi seems to work well.