Catching a Bad Network Setup With My Cellphone and PDA

[From Roberto Castillo] Hello Sammy, I hope you enjoyed your holidays. I know that my holidays were certainly interesting. My brother had been complaining that his laptop's wifi card had died. Since the machine had already been serviced for the same problem, I suspected that he was right and prepared to do a little troubleshooting over the holidays. When I got to his house, I quickly noticed that my new T-Mobile G1 couldn't find his home wifi hotspot. I pulled out my Palm TX to doublecheck and it couldn't find the network either.

So I had a pretty good idea that my brother's laptop didn't have a problem without even looking at it. I hopped onto a wired PC and checked the house's router configuration and quickly discovered that its wireless properties were misconfigured. I fixed it and my G1 and TX -- as well as my brother's laptop could now connect to the network wirelessly which made for a merry Christmas and a networked New Year.