New to wireless

[roguerower]

Yesterday I finally was able to convince my parents that for them wireless would be the better solution since we have a desktop, my mom has a laptop, I have my laptop when I'm at home and not at school (VT FTW!) and my dad will occasionally bring his laptop home from work. In the past we just had the desktop hooked up to the router and if I needed a connection I had to use one of my neighbors (dunno who) WLAN connection or snake a 50 foot cat5 cable along the ground to my room.

After setting up the WLAN yesterday, I was successfully able to connect the desktop, my laptop, and my mom's laptop with very little confusion. However when I went downstairs to watch a movie, my mom came into the room and started rearranging stuff and accidently knocked the power plug out of the socket for the wireless router. When I came back in an hour and a half to just check on things the internet was not working. Where my old profile had been, there was nada and the only connection that my desktop was picking up was one named linksys, which turned out to be my router.

My question is...when the power plug gets disconnected, do any profiles in the router get wiped clean like RAM does after you turn off you PC or is it supposed to retain them. I have no problems w/ the networking, but my main concern is that when I leave for school again this fall, I'll leave both parents home alone w/ the router and i have no doubt that something will happen and they'll call me in a panic wondering what to happen. I have tried helping people over the phone w/ computers before and I know it sucks (had to help a friend put together a desktop over the phone...talk about pain).

Anyway to retain the profiles?

 

[ojai00]

When you disconnect the power from the router, it is supposed to save whatever settings you have. Only when you are performing a hard reset (holding the reset button and then plugging the power back) will the router erase the settings and revert back to the factory defaults.

 

[jlazzaro]

As stated, it should save all settings. If you put a username/password on it, I dont see them changing any of the settings.

If you wanted the ability to restore just in case, most routers have the ability to upload/download configuration files from a TFTP server.

 

[Mogadon]

Another bit of advice. Put the router somewhere well out of the way, in fact maybe so out of the way that your parents will never even be able to look at it, that way you reduce the risk of anyone 'pulling the plug'.