Wireless networking help

[Radii]

I have a linksys wireless router. 1 desktop, 1 laptop behind it. Desktop is plugged in via ethernet. Laptop uses a linksys Wireless card (802.11b).

My question seems to be more related to the laptop setup/wireless card config than anything else.

I had not really looked too often before, but I had to go into the card config utility to connect a couple of days ago. There is a "site survey" tab with a list of availlable wireless connections. There are two... One matches the MAC address on the wireless router. The other doesn't match the laptop/desktop/wireless router MAC address...

So I can connect to the one in my house fine. But I would kind of like to configure my card to only talk to my router, and to have my router only take in connections from the laptop.

I know I can research the security on the router and figure that out, but, if someone could point me to something easy on how to secure it that'd be helpful.

I have no idea what to do on the wireless card side. I was hoping it was something as simple as changing the channel from the default 6 to 7, but I can't seem to tell the card to only seek on channel 7 or whatever.

Thoughts/advice? I can get myself connected with no problem, but I don't want my wife to have problems with the laptop and have to figure out which MAC address is the right one, etc :P Thanks!

[cartman]

The cards for laptops weren't really designed to connect to only one router. This is because since a laptop is mobile, you can take it around, and connect to many different points. Usually you can select a "preferred" wireless network, and the laptop will connect to this one before any other one. But you will still see the multiple networks if you do the site survey. As for the router, all you should have to do is configure the MAC address of the laptop as an allowed device. The manual or online help should point you in the right direction for that.

[Radii]

The cards for laptops weren't really designed to connect to only one router. This is because since a laptop is mobile, you can take it around, and connect to many different points. Usually you can select a "preferred" wireless network, and the laptop will connect to this one before any other one. But you will still see the multiple networks if you do the site survey. As for the router, all you should have to do is configure the MAC address of the laptop as an allowed device. The manual or online help should point you in the right direction for that.

Thanks :) I think I figured it out. I had to change the settings on the wireless card from "Infrastructure mode" to "Ad-hoc mode" which let me specify a SSID and a channel, and now it appears to be connecting to my router by default. I found the setting you were talking about to limit what MAC addresses can connect to my router.