Turn your laptop into a wireless Access Point with Windows 7!
- by David Nudelman
Windows 7 offers a very cool feature where you can connect multiple devices to any wired and wireless network connection (hotel, cable, 3G, UMTS, EDGE, WIFI, RJ45, Ethernet, etc.) by turning your own laptop into a wireless AP (Access Point) to relay those devices not directly connected to the internet.
For this just enter these two commands to an elevated (right click on CMD.EXE, run as administrator):
netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=YOURFRIENDLYSSID key=SOMEPASSWORD
netsh wlan start hostednetwork
At this point, if Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) is setup, anyone can connect to your SoftAP (if they know the PWD of course) and the traffic will be sent through whatever adapter you want. You can actually bridge it across an entirely different adapter... or the same on a different Wifi LAN.
A GUI to set this up can be downloaded for free here: http://www.connectify.me/
