Hi All,

I?m wondering if someone on here might be able to help with an annoying little problem I?m having when trying to connect my Acer Ferrari 3200 laptop to my home network.   Currently, I have two PCs (one desktop connected via RJ45, one laptop connected wirelessly using Linksys PCMCIA network adapter) connected to the network created by a Linksys WAG54G (V2) wireless adsl router.   The network uses WPA2-Personal encryption with an alpha-numeric network key.

The laptop has a built-in ?Acer InviLink 802.11g WLAN mini-pci module?, although it sees that the network is there, it won?t allow me to connect to it.   Every time I enter the network key I get a message saying:

?The network password needs to be 40bits or 104 bits depending on your network configuration.   This can be entered as 5 or 13 ASCII characters or as 10 or 26 hexadecimal characters.?

From what I can see, it looks like it is trying to connect to the network using WEP encryption ? which is, as far as I can tell, where the problem lies.   However, I have searched through the device manager configuration panel for the module and cannot find anything that mentions using WPA encryption instead.   Ideally, I?d rather not change the router?s encryption to WEP, as I?m told that WPA is more secure.   Surely a brand new laptop such as this wouldn?t be supplied with a WLAN module that only supports WEP and not WPA?   If so, it?s not the end of the world, because I do have a spare PCMCIA card that I can use, although I?d rather not have to.   Can anyone offer any suggestions?   The laptop is running XP Home (Sp1 ? which also surprised me, I?d have thought it would have come with SP2).

Cheers,
Marc.

I recommend updating to Service Pack 2.  Wireless capabilities are much improved.

Thanks Chandler.   I've upgraded to SP2 and now WPA2 seems to work fine.

Cheers,
Marc.