How to Turn Your Windows PC Into a Wi-Fi Hotspot

How to Turn Your Windows PC Into a Wi-Fi Hotspot

Windows can turn your laptop (or desktop) into a wireless hotspot, allowing your other devices to connect to it. With Internet Connection Sharing, it can share your Internet connection with those connected devices.
Thanks to a hidden virtual Wi-Fi adapter feature in Windows, you can even create a Wi-Fi hotspot while you’re connected to another Wi-Fi network, sharing one Wi-Fi connection over another one.

Setup a Wi-Fi Hotspot Using Connective

If you want to setup a Wi-Fi router hotspot with loads of options and a nice interface, Connective has a great application called Hotspot that lets you easily create a hotspot from your internet connection. If you pay for the Pro version you can even use your PC as a Wi-Fi repeater or a wired router, or share a tethered connection off your phone.
Connective Hotspot is great if you’re at a hotel that charges per device, or if you’re on a plane and you connect your laptop but don’t want to pay more to connect your phone.
It’s really more of a power user tool, but if you’re looking for a good solution, Hotspot is free to try out, and the basic version is free with some limitations.

Setup a Wi-Fi Hotspot Using Virtual Router

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Windows has integrated ways to create a Wi-Fi hotspot, but you should probably skip them. The open-source Virtual Router application will work better in most cases. It’s actually just a little interface on top of powerful features built into Windows — features that Windows itself doesn’t expose.
For example, it creates a virtual Wi-Fi adapter that allows you to be connected to a Wi-Fi network while hosting your own Wi-Fi network. You can do both things at once with just a single Wi-Fi adapter, making this an ideal way to share hotel Wi-Fi connections and other Wi-Fi networks you may only have a single login to.
It also provides a nice interface for setting this up, one more convenient than the one found in Windows 7. Windows 8 doesn’t provide any graphical interface for setting this up, so it’s even more important there. The commercial Connective application just provides a pretty interface on top of these features built into Windows, and Virtual Router will let you do the same thing without spending any money or seeing any advertisements.
Download Virtual Router and launch it. Provide a name for your network, enter a passphrase, and choose the connection you want to share with devices that connect to that Wi-Fi network. Click the “Start Virtual Router” button, and you’re done. You can even see a list of connected devices in this window.

Windows 7

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This feature is integrated into Windows 7’s networking interface. Open the Manage Wireless Networks window, click the Add button, and click “Create an ad hoc network.” Enter a name and passphrase for the network and it’ll appear in the list of wireless networks. Select it and your laptop will disconnect from its current Wi-Fi network, hosting an ad-hoc network your other devices can connect to.
Be sure to activate the “Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection” checkbox if you want to share an Internet connection — for example, a wired Ethernet connection — with the devices connected to your laptop’s hotspot.

Windows 8 and 8.1

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For whatever reason, Microsoft removed the graphical wizard that allows you to create an ad-hoc wireless network in Windows 8.
However, this is still built into the Windows operating system, and you can set it up without any third-party software. You’ll just need to visit the Command Prompt and run a few commands to configure and activate your Wi-Fi hotspot. Be sure to enable the “Internet Connection Sharing” checkbox if you’d like to share another Internet connection with devices that connect to the ad-hoc wireless network.

Internet Connection Sharing

Thanks to Virtual Router and Windows’ ability ot connect to a network and host a hotspot at the same time, you can use these tricks to easily share Wi-Fi networks. But the Internet Connection Sharing feature built into Windows can be used in other ways, too.
You could use this feature to share your Internet connection over a Bluetooth PAN or via an Ethernet cable plugged into your computer. Just be sure to enable the Internet Connection Sharing option under the adapter’s properties.

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Note that some devices may not be able to create to the ad-hoc Wi-Fi network created by this method. It depends on the specific device and the Wi-Fi features it supports.