Jspeach, since you've posted I've thought about seeing someone else's posts here saying same thing. Angela, confusion made clear -simply- my pc scans clean, so that's a good news, it seems Microsoft Security-Firewall and Norton's Firewall- might have clashed, some tell me they shouldn't, that its okay to have 2 firewalls, some say to leave only one, in either case, I can't connect to Yahoo e-mail or directly to Internet Explorer, can to other sites. After talking with 2 HP tech's in India-it tires you, imagine them too, smile. I understand about fast talking at times- except when you're long distance and certain keys and letters need to be typed, takes a while to figure it, I'll call them again today, fingers crossed and knocking on the wood. Angela, I promised them recipes, make it a cookbook, if they fix my pc, lol Hope to stay in touch with you and other pals, GB Bea.Letica@Gmail.com

zep et. al.: Sorry I didn't get back sooner but with my limited experience, I was a little leary of doing the uninstall of network adapter. However I finally realized that at worst it would only mess up the laptop and not the other devices that are connected and working on the secured network. So: I just uninstalled and rebooted. The adapter did reinstall but I am still not getting a proper connection although things have slightly changed. The secured network got connected, but did not even ask for the security password and simply went to 'validating identity' and simply hung. It didn't even time out. I checked firefox to see if it was expecting a password there, as was the initial case to get connected to the Guest Network (where I am again now), but it couldn't find the server. You may recall, that previously the issue was that the secured net would ask for the password, but find it unacceptable and give 'limited or no connectivity. Is there a way to force the network to ask for the password?? Any other ideas? Eventually, I will probably find a way to get a knowledgeable person out to my house where they could diagnose this. FYI, I am creating another post about security updates that may tangentially be connected to this thread. I apparently successfully installed sp3 but 'security update' keeps wanting to install it AGAIN! I was worried I might not be able to shut down to reload the adapter, but I was able to cancel the update.

As Mikie mentioned, dial-up routers are pretty are rare these days and the ones that do exist are going to be used or rather expensive. She probably doesn't really need one. If she is going to use dial-up, you need to find her an ISP that provides dial-up service. I don't know who they are any more but Google should be able to help. She doesn't need to contact the phone company unless she wants DSL. If she happens to be on one of the restricted minute phone plans, she'll need to change that. Dial-up is just like a voice call and would count toward her call allowance. Unless the laptop has a built in modem, she's going to need an external one that connects via USB. With that setup, there will be no need to worry about wireless networking.

I don't know anyone who supplies there real info to web based email accounts. Why would anyone do that?? What ever info you enter should be written down and saved somewhere though. If you should ever forget your password or your account gets hijacked they will ask you for you "information". After all they can't just send out passwords for accounts to just anybody who asks for it claiming to be the owner of said account. I learned this the hard way with my Yahoo account. They needed to know my birthday in order to retrieve my password for me and how the heck would I remember what I had put down when I signed up? Good-bye Yahoo email account. Some email services ask for your referrer email account too so take note of that also.