On 15 Jan 11:01, John Seago wrote:
I am connected to the internet via a Netgear DG834 Router, which has four outlets. Up until now I have been the only user. (thus I have never had any need to even consider the matter of more than a single user). My wife's god-daughter is due to vist shortly with her laptop, can I just plug her lap-top into one of the three vacant outlets and assign her the next number in the 192.168.0.X series? Do I need to turn the router off to plug in an extra outlet?
"Plug in an extra outlet"?!!?
Well, the basic answer is something like this - the DG834 runs a DHCP server, so you shouldn't need to do anything very much at all, plug (cat5) network lead in to the DG834, plug other end in to laptop (no, you do not need to turn either off to plug network leads in), watch windows go "ooooh, someone's plugged in a network lead" and wander off for a DHCP lease, marvel as it all "just works" (tm).
(If it doesn't just work, then you've configured the DG834 manually, at which point, we can't second guess you!)
As she is using Microsoft I presume there will be some kind of 'Wizard' that will take us through the necessary steps.
This is age old networking, it'll "just work". Even windows just about gets networking right (well, except in vista, where I couldn't find how to renew the lease, but then I cheated and used cmd, then ipconfig /renew, which then popped up a box that actually let us play with the network config... but usually there'll be 2 little screens in the taskbar that you can right clicky on and get properties of the notwork connection).
Lalala,