Back in the days of the plethora of free beta versions of Windows 7, a little known feature lurked under the hood of the operating system. The design team in Redmond had implemented a “virtual wifi” feature that, when enabled allowed other wireless devices (laptops, pda’s mobile phones) to use your laptop to connect to the internet. Essentially your laptop became a wireless access point.
Windows 7 is now grown up and for some reason this nifty utility was yanked off the feature list. Oddly enough, the virtual wifi coding remains buried in the operating system. Whipping up a little coding voodoo, the folks at Connectify have released a free beta application that brings to life once again this hidden feature. Go ahead, share the internets with your friends.
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Thanks for writing about Connectify. We thought you may want to know that Connectify 1.0 is now available for free as the first production ready release. Some older wireless cards do not yet have full Windows 7 support, and for those devices Connectify will act as an Ad Hoc connection manager, instead of a full blown Wi-Fi Access Point.
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