So.. I have no clue what Im doing.

Question

So. Im going to attempt to summarize my entire day of trying to get this to work. I have a dell computer that has cable for its internet and I bought an ibook for college and the apple store guy told us that wed have to get the airport extreme to connect the ibook to the dells internet. And he said wed have to have a cord from the cable modem to the airport and and the a cord from the airport to the dell. So we did that and Im soooo confused as to why its not working. First it didnt work then we had the internet on the ibook but not on the dell. And the dell has windows xp but I have no clue if this is the reason or what. So Im sure none of what Im saying is making sense because Im so irritated so Im rambling. But thats about all we know of. So any solutions?

Answer 1

We are running five computers off one Airport express cabled to a cable modem. 4 wireless ibooks and one e-machine. The Power is there. It helps when you understand what is happening. So, I'm giving you a non -techie nana's explanation as I understand it.
First: The cable modem can only have one legal user. You needed to understand one basic fact about how the cable modem works, i.e. ....When it is first powered up it recognizes one device as being the legal owner of its services and will only open the net gates for that device.
Second: ....It won't share that connection with a second computer. When you want to share your cable modem, you either have to turn it off and on to recognize a new user everytime you switch computers or you need to introduce a router into the mix.
Solution.....Fool the Cable modem to share the connection.
Your Airport base station acts as your router. You power off your cable modem and cable the Airport Express to it so that when you power up the modem, it recognizes the Airport as its legal user. the cablemodem thinks your base station is a computer. ...the computer that has the right to use the internet.
Now you power up your iBook and run the installer software that came with the Airport Express. The book explains the steps to follow in detail. Once the ibook is finding the Airport Express Station, and the software is installed, it connects to the internet. Since your ibook is finding & connecting to wifi at school, the most you should have to do is to say yes when it asks if it should connect to your base station at home.
Your ibook —>AirportExpressBaseStation—>CableModem——YourService Provider ——WorldWideNet
The Airport Express Base Station makes one connection to the net which it shares with the computers which connect to it. But the Cable Modem never knows there's more than one computer.
SO 1. Reestablish that link at home using your ibook, then
2. Connect the Dell.
3. If the Dell doesn't connect, get back to us and we'll go from there