As to item 2., this is unlikely. The more likely issue is firewall settings or
ACL settings.

As to item 1., there are utilities I have heard about in this group, but I
haven't personally altered existing partitions. Other people here have
experience as I have read about this before.

1. If you have unused hard drive space it should be possible to expand any
of your partitions using gparted or even Puppy Linux. Note that you can't do
this on a mounted partition, hence you need to work from a bootable utility
or operating system on a CD or flash drive.

2. If you have the "wrong" settings then of course you can't use the
service. Your provider has to restrict the service to those who have the
right to use it, otherwise the whole world has access to the account you
have paid for.

Do you really mean "WiFi provider" or is it "cellular service provider"? In
both cases the settings have to match up. Most people use a wireless Router
in their own home or office and are their own "provider". In both cases it
should be possible to find out the security settings or change them to
something you can configure in your client. WAP security is the best choice
by far for WiFi.

It's fairly easy to misconfigure a Router, so it pays to read the
documentation over carefully if that might be the source of your problems.

Thanks for the reply. The routers are provided by NYCWireless.net to our
building. We were probably athe first Brooklyn Wifi Hotspot.

I was wondering if I could just guess at what the security setting was often
enough to get hooked up if they had gone to a secure system from the old one
which just ran

Now I understand!

First questions are: is the service still being provided and is it
free for all? If both answers are "yes" then do they have a help line
you can call for (free) support? Is there a website that you might be
able to access from a public library or friend's computer? Do you know
any neighbours who use the service? They may be able to help.

Free access is nice but may be a bit slow and/or unreliable. If there
is no security then you are exposing all your transmissions to
possible everdropping by anybody who might want to capture your
banking and email passwords etc. Not a good situation.

According to the NYC Wireless web site users have to register with an
e-mail address and then they are given a password to log into the
system with. It's not to access the Wi-Fi itself so presumably this is
set to no encryption and it's the servers that provide the service
that require the log in.

Check out the site: http://www.nycwireless.net/