easy way to make my d link wirelss rouiter priviate??

ivxx is correct – for the first half of the first sentence. After that…

Do log into your router as ivxx said to do, however, depending on your particular router, the username/password might be different. Use this page to check: http://www.default-password.info/d-link/

Once you are logged into your router, CHANGE THE USERNAME/PASSWORD. If you don’t, then someone can log into the router and change anything they want, including locking YOU out.

In all cases (depending on router), you’ll see a ‘Save Settings’ button. If this is NOT clicked after your changes, then obviously nothing will be saved to the router.

After you’re logged in, you’re going to get a page that might look like this: http://support.dlink.com/Emulators/wbr2310/lan.htm, if not try replacing the ‘wbr2310’ in the link with your router model.

Next ivxx said to enable hidden broadcast. How you will ultimately do this by clicking menu options changes based on your router. Here’s the page to do so on our example router: http://support.dlink.com/Emulators/wbr2310/wireless.htm. Big note here: this will only stop the least of your curious neighbors. Any ‘script kiddie’, or us elderly folk, can determine the SSID very easily.

What you’ll want to do is really discourage minor hackers and wannabe’s. So disable the wireless on your computer and hookup the computer and router with a cable. If you don’t do this, then you’re going to end up in lala land quickly.

[Tools] Log back into your router using your new user-id/password. Make sure to change the user account also. The passwords SHOULD be difficult, otherwise they will be hacked easily enough.

[Setup/Wireless] Get back to this page, and change the Wireless Network Name from ‘dlink’ to something else. Write this down. Go ahead and click the enable hidden broadcast. Now for the tricky part. If your computer and router support it enable wireless security using one of the WPA-2 schemes and set up the key. In addition to writing this down, I also like to put it in a file on a cheap usb stick. If friends are visiting, then I can use the stick to transfer data w/o having to type it.

At this point you could stop, disconnect cable enable wireless on your computer connect to the router manually, it will ask for the WPA keys.

If needed, you can also set your router to only connect to pre-approved devices by doing what they call MAC filtering. I use this. This allows me to specify exactly which devices can connect. Between the encryption, MAC filtering and WPA, I’m fairly safe from all but the most determined.