Hotspot

After hearing about a little program called Connectify, which supposedly is able to turn a Win7 computer into a WLAN hotspot I wanted to try it out.
So I downloaded it and started it etc, but for some reason the program kept turning off DHCP on the virtual wifi miniport adapter, so my poor old xp-laptop who had to play client couldn't find a network adress, thus the connection remained incomplete.

So I researched the whole thing a bit on the internet and found out that Connectify is really no more than a GUI for features that are already part of Windows 7.
I immediately de-installed Connectify, rebooted, checked the virtual wifi miniport adapter and found DHCP still off, so I turned it on.
Then (as admin) I brought up a command window and typed:

netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid="name" key="password" keyUsage=persistent

Name being the name of the network of course, and password the password. Choose to your liking.
After that I opened the sharing options of my internet connection (right click on my real wireless adapter, properties, sharing) and turned the option to share the internet connection on; and of course I had to select the connection associated with the virtual wifi adapter there.

Back to my command prompt:

netsh wlan start hostednetwork

And that was it. My client-computer immediately* found the new wlan and could access the internet through the connection of my main computer.

Very nice. To turn the hotspot off type:

netsh wlan stop hostednetwork

to see it's status type:

netsh wlan show hostednetwork


*Honestly, all this took a lot longer to figure out, but in the end it works, which makes me happy. It was all because of Connectify, effin' third party software had fucked up half of my settings.

ps: for those who don't wanna type all the lines all the time it might be easier to just create one or two .cmd files, then right-click-execute-as-admin them.
(use pause if you'd like the command window to stick around)

More information can be found for example here (German).