Bridging connections between two wireless notebooks

Question

My apartment has a very weak public WiFi signal. my vista notebook is not connecting to this public WiFi, it says signal is weak, while my win7 notebook does connect and is working OK, so i wanted to connect my vista notebook to internet using win 7 computer connection.

vista computer -> win 7 computer -> public WiFi -> internet

I tried a software "connectify" that creates virtual wireless hot spot, it says access local only on vista computer, tried turning off fire wall that didn't work either.

i also tried connecting my android phone to this virtual hot spot it keeps saying "obtaining IP address", I checked the ICS service is running that should also mean that DHCP is running. so cant identify the problem.

Answer 1

I found this out while using Hyper V. Most wireless cards aren't able to bridge (layer 2) correctly because they need to be switched to promiscuous mode. Basically, they also need to be able to broadcast Ethernet packets with a MAC address that is not their own.

Your Windows 7 computer's wireless card might be one of those. I'd try downloading Microsoft's virtual wifi adapter and give it a try.

It's technically a research project, but a lot of people have found success.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/994abd5f-53d1-4dba-a9d8-8ba1dcccead7/

Answer 2

One thing I've noticed is you made no mention of putting in a second wireless card on to the working computer aka the one that does get the internet. The reason I bring this up is, as far as I know, Wi-Fi cards can only connect to one wireless network at a time and what your trying to do requites that one computer that can get on be in two separate wireless networks.

So if I where to take a guess at why the connection is dropping off. in order for your computer to create it's own wi-fi network for your other devices to connect to it. it has to disconnect only wi-fi card in the computer from the public wi-fi. which is why your devices can connect to the "shared" wireless but don't get any internet. not to hard of a thing to fix really. you can get network cards that have a usb interface and install that on your win 7 computer. then your computer will have one card it can leave connected to the public wi-fi and another to connect to the vista computer. doing it this way your options are pretty much no encryption of WEP encryption if your going to do the latter be sure to get the key set up properly as WEP can only handle a Hexidecimal password and no "wi-fi protected access" mode either.

another option you may be able to look into would be to get a Wireless Repeater and set that up this will free up the Win7 computer from having to relay the signal, which means you won't need to keep that computer running the whole time you want to use the other one. they aren't to expensive or difficult to set up either and then you don't gotta worry about something happening to the win7 computer, (like it freezing up, or accidentally turn it off or something similar)