I am changing my phone & broadband provider from BT to Southern Electric, switching over in a few days. Trouble is the new router they've sent me is about three times the size of the BT one; do I have to use it or will the old one continue to function?
You can use the old one but you'll have to update its settings to the SE ones rather than BT.
You access the settings by typing its IP address into Safari (or alternative). The IP address may be on the bottom of the router or you can find it by going to System Preferences>Network - it's likely to be 192.168.1.254 or similar. Safari will ask you for the administrator user name and password, again usually on the router. Note, this is NOT the wifi password or wireless key. Type those in and find the setup page. All you should need to change is the login User Name and password that SE have given you, hopefully in your "welcome" letter.
Very strange results: [192.168.1.88] Firefox flatly refuses to do it saying "problem loading page, try again" which gives the same result. Safari just does nothing apart from highlighting the address in blue.
Where did 192.168.1.88 come from? The router's address is likely to be at one end or the other of the address range (so end in 0 or 1 or 254 or 255), 88 would be unusual. BTW, I would expect to type http:// in front of the numbers to make a URL, I presume that's what you're doing.
Tony - I phoned Eric, the 88 was the Mac's IP address. We've been trying to alter settings in the BT router (HomeHub3 (it was 254 as I suggested earlier) but of course I can't see what Eric sees as he's not connected to the internet and I don't know the Home Hub manager software well enough to say exactly what to click and where. All BT's settings are standard so all Eric had to do was change the user name and password to those of his new ISP. We think we found the right place but it refused to connect so we both retired for a medicinal brandy!
And well deserved it was too, Mick. I think we pretty much agreed that BT disable certain funtions of the routers they give away, whilst leaving them active on the ones they sell. I screwed the new one to the side of the desk so everything's working again. And thanks for those phone calls, I'd never have figured it out alone.
Eric Jervis 