Alana,

In addition to the excellent information David gave you, I humbly render the following based on my own frustrating network learning experience. I would strongly recommend downloading Net Work Magic at networkmagic.com Not only is it free, (not a "trial free") but it is very user friendly. After a few aggravating months of bouncing between Linksys "support", Windows help and forums ad infinitum, with no consistent operation in my simple wireless network setup, I happened on this application and within an hour, all was working including file and printer sharing. I have no connection with the program in any form or manner other than a user. Did not even know it existed until a month ago. Suggest you investigate it. It might be helpful and best of all it's free.    

Alana Nichols [log in to unmask] wrote:

"...Here's the issue:  I installed the wireless card and software in the laptop.  When you try to connect you reach a point where it says "requires use of a network key."  What exactly is a network key?  We've tried to enter the router password and get this error message:
    "The network password needs to be 40bits or 104bits depending on your network configuration.  This can be entered as 5 or 13 digit ascii characters or 10 to 26 hexadecimal characters."...

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