Connecting to an unsecured network

Securing your wireless network is only necessary if you don't want other people to use your wireless connection, if you don't want people intercepting things like your credit card numbers and other personal information as they drive into your neighborhood,  if you don't want people to see all of the stuff you are doing on the internet, or if you don't want people snooping around on your hard drive, and possibly changing files.  In short, yes, it is a good idea to secure your wireless network.  Note that you should enable MAC address filtering, which will only allow computers with an address that you specify to connect to your network.  You should also considering not broadcasting the SSID of your network, and enabling some kind of encryption, WEP is OK, but WPA is much more secure.  Unfortunately, you did not tell us anything about the make and model of your wireless router, the make and models of your network adapters, nor the version(s) of Windows running on your network, otherwise we might be able to provide more detailed informaton.

Steve

To add to Steve's excellent comments, this is a reprint from last year:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1277020,00.asp

Dear Steve,

Thank you for answering my question so soon.  My wireless router is a Dell True Mobile 2300.  My adapter is an Intel (R) pro/wireless LAN 2100 3A mini pci adapter.  I use Windows XP on my desktop and laptop which is the network .  I hope that this is sufficient and that you can help me.  I think that I would like to attempt the WEP.

                                                                 Thank you,

                                                                  Lester