Okay. To this point, nothing you've posted until now has confirmed that it acts like a WAP. Sorry for going back to the beginning.
To change its settings, you need to connect to it. That will be most easily done with a wired connection. Once you're connected via wire, open a browser window to the URL for the WAP. Depending on the brand, it might be something like 192.168.1.1, 192.168.0.1, or something else.
There's probably a password for accessing the WAP. If it's set at the default, make sure you change it to something else.
When you succesfully connect to the WAP, you should be faced with maintenance screens for the WAP itself. And for all the other stuff it does, too -- firewall, router, DHCP server, and so on.
And somewhere in that list of stuff will be the settings for your WAP. Somewhere will be your SSID. Change it from the default, if that's not already been done. Don't change it to something like "home"... make it unique and unlikely for someone to guess. Remember it for later.
You may want to disable broadcasting the SSID, but I had problems with my XP Home box when I did that. So I'm broadcasting. No problems yet.
Somewhere else will be a setting that lets you enable security. It may talk about encryption, WEP, or WPA (I think; don't remember the next level of encryption beyond WEP). Enable it, and set the password to the longest length you can. Remember it for later, in both hex and plaintext.
You may want to restrict access to just your WLAN card. That's the one you picked up for your wife's computer. On it will be a MAC address, which is about 8 or 10 characters long. Somewhere in your setting will be something called something like MAC Address Filtering. Go there, and restrict access to just your MAC address.
Now, it's later. Go into your wife's computer and into the wireless configuration area. Enter the SSID that you remembered from above, enter the password and password type that you remembered from above, and you should be ready to go.
I apologize if this all seems generic, but you *still* haven't identified what make or model it is. With that info, configuration becomes much easier. [img]graemlins/hehe.gif[/img]
Good luck.