Wireless Networking doubts

Hey people, it will be glad that if any1 able to answer all my doubts about wireless networking.

1. Can I create a home networking by using wireless router? Like each of my desktops n laptops can see n share files. If can, how can it be done?

2. Security settings. To my knowledge I knw that wireless router have 3 types of security (WEP, WPA & WPA2). If 1 of my laptops is a 802.11b version, can I set my security settings to WPA or WPA2? How do I knw whether the wifi of the laptop supports all of the security types?

3. What is the usage of the WMM? Is it important to enabled it?

4. Channel? What is the channel?

5. SSID broadcast. Is it better to broadcast my SSID or disabled it? If I disabled it, how m i going to search my wireless connection using my notebook? How can it be done?


Tht's all for the time being. I really run out of idea on how wireless networking works. It really give me a hell of work to learn. Hope that you people out there can help me. Thx.

 

1) yes. Same as with a wired network. It's just another network connection, only using a different device.
2) If your laptop has XP, then yes, you can use WPA. Sometimes it may take a driver update. WPA is ok if not all your devices support WPA2.
3) WMM? I don't know what it is (and I'm too lazy to google) so I'd guess it's not important, as I have many wirelessly connected systems (including a couple Linux machines) all sharing over a network.
4) channel is the frequency the wireless access point runs on. There are different "bands" of frequencies that it uses. A channel is one band. choose one people near you aren't using to minimize collisions and errors because of radio interference.
5) It'd better to disable it, because it's just one more thing for people to see. I could find your network without the SSID being broadcast, but most people couldn't What you do is you just manually specify a connection on your notebook in that case, rather than just searching for one. A little more difficulty for a relatively siginificant gain in security.

Hope that helped you. Wireless can seem a little ethereal at first

 

You first have to allow the file sharing option on your Windows Firewall. Then in Control panel, there is Network or Home Network (I don't remember what it is called exactly, and my work computer doesn't show it). From there, you can set up your home network, and use My Computer to share files.