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Just bought a new Dell desktop for University and I need the internet. I have a wireless router in another room that accesses all our laptops. I plugged a coaxial cable from the wall jack to the desktop to access the internet but no connection. Wondering if I have to bring the wireless router up from the other room and connect it directly to the desktop or is there something else I could do that would be easier ??

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If you have a coaxial connector on your computer, it is probably for TV, not for internet.

To connect to the internet over cable (or any other medium), you must have a modem. You may connect a computer directly to this modem, but modems typically have connections for only one device; this is what a router is for. It acts as a switch to allow several computers, printers, or other 'host' devices connect to a single modem. Some modems have built in routers. I don't know what make or model yours is, so I couldn't tell you if yours does or not.

That being said, you need to connect your computer to your router. If you don't want to do this with a cable (cat5e or cat6), you can get a wireless network interface and plug it in to your computer. Follow the manufacturer's instructions to configure the wireless device for your network.

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Cable Internet.

With cable internet broadband modems, once you have connected a device to it and have gotten an internet connection, the modem logs/remembers the MAC address of that device. So, if you connected the Cable Modem to the Router, the modem got the MAC address of the router and it remembers it. If you disconnect the router, and connect a different device, like... say... a computer, the modem sees that there is a different MAC address now attached to it, and doesn't allow an internet connection. You would need to power the Cable Modem off for a few seconds, then power it on. At that point, it would grab the MAC address of the first device connected to it and work again the way it is supposed to.

Now... the Coaxial cable that connects to all your televisions, is also connected to your cable modem. You cannot connect that coaxial cable directly to a computer and get internet access. It has to connect to a modem first.

If you were actually talking about how you unplugged the ethernet cable from the cable router and plugged it directly into your desktop, you would need to power cycle the modem to get it to work as I described... however, this would kill internet access to your wireless router, and every computer connected to it.

So. How do you get internet access to this desktop, when your internet connection is handled by your wireless router that is in another room? You either need to run an ethernet cable from that router to the desktop, or you need to get a wireless card for that desktop. Well... you could also get a pair of Powerline Ethernet Adapters, but then you ALSO need a couple of ethernet cables.

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