My new toy

Just got a brand new laptop that I'm having a lot of fun with. It's my first laptop, as usually I like to build my own PC. It's a gateway, also a first for me. AMD athalon 64 4000+ processor, with a gig of ram, a dedicated ATI radeon mobility x600 video card with 256 meg of ram (half that is dedicated ram). I've run Sims 2 and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on it with no problems at all so far. It's also got a 100 gig harddrive and a DVD rewritable drive, making it better than my desktop!

My place is hooked up for wireless so now I can go all over the house. It'll help, as we had the TV and computers in separate rooms, and it will be nice to be able to post on the boards and play Oblivion and whatnot while snuggled up next to rae watching the Colbert Report.

I'm going to get a new mouse today, though. I can handle the touch pad for basic stuff, but it just doesn't work for gaming.

I also need to know how to secure my wifi so people aren't hoboing off me, as well as how to network with my computer. I'd rather do it (and understand it) myself, as opposed to having Besy Buy's Geeksquad do it for like $50. So if anyone out there has done this before, let me know.