Home WiFi and Password won't connect...

Question

I'm sure this question has been asked before but I'm such a newbie to WiFi connecting that I couldn't find a clear enough answer in the search results.
The problem is, my neighbor came to me after his older Dell Inspiron laptop finally went belly-up and he was forced to buy a new laptop. He loves my Macs and begged me to take him down to the Apple store and help him buy a Mac laptop. He ended up with a white MacBook with most hardware he could get. I told him the transition was going to be a bit frustrating at first but he would eventually get the hang of it. "Will I be able to connect to my in-house Wifi network?" "Of course," was my answer. We have so much WiFi in the neighborhood that I have held off installing my Airport Extreme and setting up WiFi in my own home.
He had "The Geek Squad" come out several years ago and they set up his "Belkin" router and he's been a happy camper with his Dell now for several years. Once the MacBook was up and running he tried connecting to his WiFi and got the familiar password box. He put his password in and received a error message that it was unrecognized. Apparently he is using or has Wep.
I am at a total loss guiding him on how to resolve the problem. Where do I start and if there is an easy step by step answer please post it.
Thanks Guys...
John

Answer 1

David, I have to be honest here and say no, neither one of us knows anything about the router or where to even find the settings for the router - would that be in a separate program installed by "The Geek Squad" when they installed it over three years ago? Or would those settings be somewhere in the WindowsXP operating system (I've never used Windows anything and have no idea where to look). He is disabled, fearful of messing around with his current working Wifi setup (just getting him to reset it took hours of talking), worrying that he will be without access. He knows nothing about setting up any kind of hardware and it took me quite a bit of time to figure out he has dsl through AT&T.
If I can get him to shut off the WEP so his network is "open" (he fears someone in the neighborhood will break into his computer if he drops the security) we can then check the password problem. His trust (of me) will come when I can give him good advice, i.e., "Go into your utilities folder and start your router program, uncheck the box for WEP security..." (do Windows users have a ulities folder?).
It took me a day and a half to get him to understand how to install a program in his Applications folder. Despite my showing him repeatedly, he would place the cursor on the .app and point the cursor to the Applications folder, then run the .app (from its original mounted box), close it and it would disappear (because he was not dragging the .app into the Applications folder, just pointing to it).
So this is what I'm dealing with. But all of this advice and guidance is broadening my own knowledge and giving me more confidence when I deal with him so it is very much appreciated.
John