If your network hardware is more than a year or two old, it may not support WPA. Check with your manufacturer and find out. If your manufacturer doesn’t have details, you can also turn to the WI-Fi Alliances website for information about what hardware can handle WPA. Just remember that all your network hardware has to support WPA, your router and your wireless network cards. So do the operating systems running on every networked PC.
If you can use WPA, set some serious time aside for installing it, its not for the weak of heart. There’s no room here to give you a comprehensive blow-by-blow description of how to use WPA, but here are the steps you’ll take. For more information see the PC Magazine article.
1. Install the WPA software. WPA isn’t built directly into many versions of Windows XP (although it is built into SP2), so you’ll have to download it. Go to this Microsoft’s page to download an update that will let XP use WPA. Then head on over to this page of Microsoft’s website for information about how to install and configure WPA.
2. Update your router’s and network cards firmware. Your hardware may not take advantage of WPA. Check with the relevant manufacturers and see if a firmware update will do the job. If so, download and install the firmware. Remember that you’ll have to upgrade all your wireless networking hardware, not just a few components.
3. Configure WPA on your router. This can be fairly complex process, depending on your router, so check the manufacturer’s documentation. Its similar to setting up WEP, but requires several extra steps.
4. Configure WPA on your network cards. Using the key you generated on your router, configure WPA on your network cards. You’ll use the “Wireless network properties” dialog box, much as you did when you configured WEP.
