Please recommend a good online guide to troubleshooting an 802.11b connection that broke

A friend has asked me to troubleshoot his simple home network. He has
an XP machine directly connected to a Belkin router (not sure which
model), then a Windows 98 machine that was once wirelessly networked
to that connection.

For a month or so now, the wireless connection has not worked. I'm
too far away to go investigate personally and I've just thrown a bunch
of suggestions at him. Nothing has worked, including spending two
hours talking to a Belkin technician.

I am suspecting that the problem may lie in the wireless card in the
Windows 98 machine (I don't even know the brand), or that somehow the
configuration settings got messed up. I'm trying to gently prod him
to just install and configure the whole thing over again from scratch.

Until I can come look at his setup myself, I have a couple questions:

1. First, can someone recommend a good easy-to-understand step-by-step
tutorial/troubleshooting guide online that might walk my friend
through his problem (in a nutshell: network worked, then stopped
working all of a sudden)?

2. Second, do Belkin routers offer the option of saving their
configuration data to a computer file? My Netgear router does this
and I feel some confidence that if something went wrong, I could get
things up and running again with minimal fuss because of this feature.

I do not know of any 'step-by-step' trouble-shooting guide.

But, I DO recommend the book published by O'Reilly
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/802dot11/
because it provides one with the necessary THEORY
to be able to think much more logically about things.
(It will thus be a bit of a longer reading assignment, but it
may well be worth it.)

My 2-cents...

Dave


"jersie0" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> A friend has asked me to troubleshoot his simple home network. He has
> an XP machine directly connected to a Belkin router (not sure which
> model), then a Windows 98 machine that was once wirelessly networked
> to that connection.
>
> For a month or so now, the wireless connection has not worked. I'm
> too far away to go investigate personally and I've just thrown a bunch
> of suggestions at him. Nothing has worked, including spending two
> hours talking to a Belkin technician.
>
> I am suspecting that the problem may lie in the wireless card in the
> Windows 98 machine (I don't even know the brand), or that somehow the
> configuration settings got messed up. I'm trying to gently prod him
> to just install and configure the whole thing over again from scratch.
>
> Until I can come look at his setup myself, I have a couple questions:
>
> 1. First, can someone recommend a good easy-to-understand step-by-step
> tutorial/troubleshooting guide online that might walk my friend
> through his problem (in a nutshell: network worked, then stopped
> working all of a sudden)?
>
> 2. Second, do Belkin routers offer the option of saving their
> configuration data to a computer file? My Netgear router does this
> and I feel some confidence that if something went wrong, I could get
> things up and running again with minimal fuss because of this feature.