Newbie Assistance

Okay so i have located the IP address of acomputer i would like to gain access to. it is on a un******* wireless connection. it is not running all the time. usually only at night.
what appraoch should i take to gain access. i am actaully looking for a password.
i am out of their region so i am not sure if a cain & abel or ettercap wll work.
can someone point me to some great articles. or would someone like to coach me on this one, i am trying to learn as fast as possible but could use some good mentorship.

any thoughts????

I'm learning this as I go so have patience if I get some advice wrong:
First of all run a network/port scan using a program such as Nessus. This will list the open ports (listening) and the vulnerabilities these ports have.

Second, once you find an opening, for example a weak telnet password or anonymous FTP login, try to capture the traffic on the network (that port). Hopefully you will be able to capture a password in there.

From what I'm learning, it seems finding and cracking the pass is the easiest part. Finding the vulnerability and exploiting is the hardest part.

Once you have hashes to crack use Cain, Lopht or John the Ripper to crack the password hashes.

If you gain admin on the computer, you can use pwdump2 to dump the hashes to a text file to be run through a cracking program.

Hope this little bit of info helps...good luck.