Friday, June 05, 2009

Techies: Help Please


A couple of years ago I bought a no-nonsense Dell Laptop for home use, as an alternative to my gaming machine and as a living room entertainment suppliment. Later on, it proved to be quite heavy as far as laptops go, so I got myself a snappy new Macbook Air, and it was great, problem solved.

So I thought of using my Dell for other uses; I installed Ubuntu 8.10 on it and experimented with some of the packages and tools, played some games, watched a lot of movies on it, did some word processing and presentation designs on it, and it's taken all that like a pro!

Now I'm thinking of using it for something more social. I'm thinking; It has WinXP Home, built-in WiFi, a relevant USB port, a 14-inch screen, built-in air cooler, network port, dial-up port, DVD, the works. I'm thinking of further maximizing it's usefulness in another capacity, by modifying it into a WiFi Router to work with my Zain Ego Device. 

I know that it can theoretically cab be done. The Dell's built-in WiFi card and WinXP's Internet Connection Sharing feature, coupled with Zain's Ego device as the main internet port, along with some restrictions and password-protected files  would make this seem to be a possible avenue to consider.

I'm planning to put this "experiment" of mine next weekend, as I'm bedridden with a dreadful cold at the moment and can't tolerate trial-and-error messages from Microsoft produtcs. I'd appreciate it if anyone would kindly email me some ideas on how to set it up, if at all.

Cheers up front.

1 comment:

Âme said...

What do I need to set a HotSpot?

1. Active Cable Internet
2. Laptop
3. WiFi on Laptop
4. Wired net connection

Once you have all the above things mentioned, you are all set to follow the steps:

How to setup HotSpot on Windows Vista:

1. Got to Control Panel
2. Click on “Network and Sharing Centre”
3. Under Tasks choose “Setup New Connection”
4. Wireless “Ad-hoc network”
5. Now type in a “Network Name”
6. Choose “WEP” password if you don’t want to share the connection with the entire world
7. Click “Internet connection sharing”
8. Done!

Now a WiFi enabled machine will be able to connect to the network you have just setup with the WEP password

Lets setup a HotSpot on a Windows XP machine:

1. Go into Control panel
2. Open “Network Connections”
3. Right click on "Wireless Connection" and click on "Properties"
4. Click on the "Wireless Networks" tab and select the check-box which says “Use Windows to configure my wireless network settings”
5. Under “Prefered networks” click “Add”
6. Type a name in “Network name” text box
7. Select “Shared” from the options under “Network Authentication”
8. Under Data encryption select “WEP” and type in your password in “Network Key” field and now click "OK"
9. Now the new HotSpot should show in the list of preferred networks.
10. Click on the “Advance” button and select “Computer-to-computer (ad hoc) networks only" and press close
11. Hit “OK”, we are done with the wireless connection properties

One more step, we have to change something in the wired connection setting so that it knows that it has to share connection with the computers accessing our HotSpot.

1. Go to local Area Connections, right click it and select properties
2. Go to the “Advanced” tab and under Internet Connection Sharing check the box which says “Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s internet connection” and make sure the box under that is NOT selected so that no one can disable the network remotely.
3. Hit “OK”

I hope this helps setting up a wireless connection without a WiFi router. Have Fun!

Courtesy: http://tnerd.com/2007/07/25/how-to-convert-laptop-wireless-wifi-hotspot/