It seems a lot of simmers tend to work in the IT industry or PCs so maybe you can shed some light on this for me. Temporary housing situation for the next 6 weeks until my new place is ready. So I am using this apartment's free wireless internet access via my laptop. All is good. Now I want to connect an older "wired" Linksys router to my laptop and have my printer connect to my laptop via the router. Pretty straightforward. (That way I can add a 2nd PC to use the printer down the road).Issue is, the moment I connect the router to my laptop I immediately loose my internet connection from the laptop wireless access. Pull the CAT5 cable out and wham... internet is back (well, most of the time). Is there anyway I can make this setup work? thx,CLutch

It seems a lot of simmers tend to work in the IT industry or PCs so maybe you can shed some light on this for me. Temporary housing situation for the next 6 weeks until my new place is ready. So I am using this apartment's free wireless internet access via my laptop. All is good. Now I want to connect an older "wired" Linksys router to my laptop and have my printer connect to my laptop via the router. Pretty straightforward. (That way I can add a 2nd PC to use the printer down the road).Issue is, the moment I connect the router to my laptop I immediately loose my internet connection from the laptop wireless access. Pull the CAT5 cable out and wham... internet is back (well, most of the time). Is there anyway I can make this setup work? thx,CLutch

The laptop is probably auto-switching between hard-wired and wireless modes. There should be a setting somewhere to turn off auto-switching. You might already have special software on your laptop that will do this. My older IBM does.

Hey check you network configuration may be it is change. otherwise you firewall or anti virus can be block you Internet so disable it and then try to connect.

Hey check you network configuration may be it is change. otherwise you firewall or anti virus can be block you Internet so disable it and then try to connect.

I would not recommend disabling the firewall under any circumstances. I would instead disable UAC or move the slider down to the lowest position as it could be preventing configuration changes.Best regards,Jim

if you are behind a router, the software firewall is not necessary - you can disable it w/o worry. If you are not using the router, keep it enabled.However, your problem as described has nothing to do with the firewall - probably some setting that enables one OR the other but not BOTH.Several options - use a switch, not a router or depending on the type of router, you can "disable" the router function and have it work as a switch.For what you want, a router is the wrong bit of hardware - get a 4 port switch.Vic