Once you get your router up and going it's a good idea to setup encryption. This will make sure that no one else is using your internet at the very least. After all, you don't want some one hogging your bandwidth while your trying to watch a online video. To do this, you will need to log into the web interface of your router. It is best to do this on a directly connected computer so that you do not have to hard reset the router and start over. Start by clicking on start, run and type CMD. In Vista/7 type CMD in the search. Click ok or hit enter. You will be at a black command prompt with a blinking curser. Type in ipconfig and hit enter. You will get a whole bunch of data. What you are looking for is the IP address. You may have one for your local area network connection and one for your wireless network connection. Find the appropriate one and take note of it. You could write it down or leave the command prompt open. It will be something like 192.168.0.2 . Now open internet explorer or your web browser. Type in the first three sets of numbers exactly as you found in the command prompt(192.168.0) . Followed by the number 1. So in this example we will type in 192.168.0.1 in internet explorer. You should get a log on screen. Type in the username and password for your router. If it is still the default and you are not sure what it is, try visiting the default password list link on my page.

Once your logged into the router, you will need to find where they put the encryption section. It's likely that you are looking for wireless settings, security Or maybe advanced and then security. Do some looking around until you find it. You are just using a home router odds are you do not need a lot of security. For most people WEP standard encryption is plenty good enough. It works with all wireless cards and it is the most likely to simply just work for you. However, WPA is recommended and WPA2 is the only version that can not be hacked easily at this time. Depending on the type of WEP you choose, you will probably need to come up with either a 10 or 20 digit hexadecimal code. Hexadecimal means that you can use the letters a-f and the numbers 1-9 . So for example 987654321f will work. What ever you choose, I strongly recommend that you take the time and right it down. Then apply the setting and restart your router.

Now back on your wireless computer. Wait several minutes and try connecting to the wireless network again. It will prompt for the code. Type it in and you should be set to go. After the first time, your computer will save the setting and you should not have to enter in the code again. However, from time to time you probably will need to anyway.

You can find more on wireless security at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_encryption . Otherwise feel free to sign up to my site under the hire a geek section and ask all the questions you want.