After months of searching for a Nintendo Wii, I finally found one at Wal*Mart. So I bought it - along with some extra controllers and a memory card. I got it home and unpacked it. Everything that I needed to get started was included in the box - although I would have preferred to have component video cables instead of a composite one. The hookup was simple enough. I plugged in the power cable, the composite A/V cable, and the sensor bar cable. I put the batteries in the wireless remote, turned the Wii on, and it powered right up. Everything was going great until it was time to get the Wii online.

I wanted to get the Wii online mainly for the purposes of getting software updates, downloading games, and trading Mii's with other people. If you don't know, Mii's are characters that you create on the Wii that can be used in certain games. You can also trade Mii's with other people.

The Wii comes with built in 802.11b/g Wi-Fi or you can connect the Wii to a network via a USB to ethernet adapter. Since I have 3 PC's, an Xbox, and an Xbox360 connected to my wireless g network, I figured it would be a no-brainer to hook up the Wii. I was wrong. It took me over two hours of trial and error to get the Wii and my DLink router to work together.

When I first tried getting the Wii and my router to work together, I kept getting 51330 and then 52030 and then 52132 errors. I finally got things working. This is how I did it...

Setting up the router:

First log into the D-Link DI-624's control panel as the administrator. Then go to the Home tab and click on 'Wireless' on the left menu. Since the Wii's wireless adaptor will only work with router set to Channel 1 or 11, you must make sure that the Super G Mode is not set to "Super G with Turbo". "Super G with Turbo" only works with Channel 6 therefore it will not work with the Wii. Choose your security settings. I set the security box to WPA, Cipher Type to TKIP, and PSK/EAP to PSK. Set the passphrase, then click on 'Apply' to restart the router.

Next, go to the DHCP left button. Get the MAC address of the Wii from the Wii setup page. Make an entry for the Wii in the "Static DHCP" area and press the Apply button to restart the router.

Setting up the Wii:

In the Wii's setup, tell it to not automatically assign an IP address. Enter the IP address in the Wii that you added as Static DHCP on the router. For the subnet mask, enter 255.255.255.0. Then for the router address enter the IP address of your router, probably 192.168.0.1 or something like that..

Conclusion:

I was expecting to hook the Wii up and have it automatically work with my wireless router. In the end, I ended up having to change my network settings and assigning a static IP address to the Wii on my network. Although I got everything working together, it took much longer than I anticipated. I was a little dissapointed that this wasn't as easy as I thought it should be - and there was little help available both in the documentation and online. But now that it's up and running, the Wii has performed well for over 6 months so far.