I just spent way too much money not on paintball

[silentdeath55]

Well, yesterday I finally decided to get a pocket PC. I ordered the HP iPAQ 5550 along with a 1GB SD card and a wireless router. Cost was about 600 with shipping (outrageous $20 to ship). The PDA has a fingerprint security feature which I thought was pretty cool.

On a second note, I have a question for the computer "geeks" (no offense). With the wireless router, it's a 802.11g netgear router and I was wondering if I have to contact my internet provider and have them add another service charge or something for it to work. I didnt think so, but one of my friends said that it costs extra to have a Wi-Fi network in your house. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks!

[danheneise]

the only cost of WiFI is the cost of the hardware itself, as far as the ISP is concerned they won't have a clue whether you're on a wired LAN or wireless network.

[cheetah256]

they might try to charge you for having extra computers hooked up to it, but only if you tell them. most places will look the other way if it's just a home network.

[pbzmag]

Alot of ISP are now offering to setup home networking for a small fee. Truth is, you can do it yourself. Follow the instructions and your good to go.

[Mango]

[Fixion]

Don't tell them you have an extra device using the net. Because you're using a router, you won't need to call your ISP to get your pocketpc to work w/ the internet. All you have to do is set it up to use your router correctly.

[Hasty8]

Well, yesterday I finally decided to get a pocket PC. I ordered the HP iPAQ 5550 along with a 1GB SD card and a wireless router. Cost was about 600 with shipping (outrageous $20 to ship). The PDA has a fingerprint security feature which I thought was pretty cool.

HE spends $600 dollars ona portable windows device and thinks the 20 for S&H is outrageous?


MY Treo 600 is phone, web, email and pda, all n one and cost me $350. What's better is it uses the super-stable Palm OS software which takes up less space than the Windows PPC software. I had the Dell Axiom for all of 15 minutes. No joke. Thing wouldn't even work out of the box. Files wouldn't open. It was total crap.

Got my Treo and everything has been perfect ever since.

What I love about it too is the picture caller id function. Just assocaite any pic with a number and when a call comes in that pic opens up. Makes caller id so much easier since I associate with faces better than just a name.

As if this was not all enough, with my third party camera I can have a fairly decent video conference with my son when I am on the road. That's the best benefit of all. Of course, you could just send video email.

All in all, imho, the Treoothers hands down.

[bornl33t]

Well, yesterday I finally decided to get a pocket PC. I ordered the HP iPAQ 5550 along with a 1GB SD card and a wireless router. Cost was about 600 with shipping (outrageous $20 to ship). The PDA has a fingerprint security feature which I thought was pretty cool.

On a second note, I have a question for the computer "geeks" (no offense). With the wireless router, it's a 802.11g netgear router and I was wondering if I have to contact my internet provider and have them add another service charge or something for it to work. I didnt think so, but one of my friends said that it costs extra to have a Wi-Fi network in your house. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks!

unless your provider has a www page where you can change it your self you are going to have to give them a call and give them the mac address of the router. Since there is no way to tell how many computers are hooked up to a router they're won't charge you for it. The thing is the ipaq's usually have 802.11b when they are wi-fi capable. I haven't taken a close look but the ones I've seen at least do. And you're router is a 802.11g... do you know what I'm getting at? Usually a router that has g also has b though... so this just might be a lack of communication. If I remember right that ipaq has blue tooth on it too? If you you should looking into a blue tooth capable phone from a gsm provider. Then you can have internet access no matter where you go! And if you do have a hot spot you aren't wasting $$ like them treo owners. Seriously, that ipaq is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better then the treo

Oh yeah, and download a gameboy emulator for that thing!!!! hehehe

[Hexis]

You may even be able to set the external Interface's MAC address so you can set it to the same thing the cable/dsl router has in the table as an authorized device.

Your ISP may have a policy about not adding additional devices, you will want to check with them. They won't be able to tell much if you setup the router correctly, and it won't really change anything.

Some 802.11b/g security tips: Use WEP, 128bit with Hex keys, generate the keys randomly. Disable "Broadcast SSID" and change the SSID to something non default. That will help secure your wireless network from wardrivers.