Connectify

It’s a wired world. You’d think by this point, most major hotels, at least those costing upwards of $100/night, would have good wired, or wireless connections for their guests. I’d like it to be free, but I’d settle for good quality.

However I hate the way that most hotels manage connectivity. It’s not by the connection, or room, but often by the MAC. So that people with one device are fine, but those of us that are techies, with more than one device, can’t connect them all. At least not cheaply.

I usually carry two laptops, a iPhone, and sometimes my wife’s got a laptop and phone as well. I’ve debated carrying a router and using that, but it’s one more thing to carry. Instead I decided to try Connectify.

It’s a wireless hotspot that runs on Windows 7 and allows your laptop to share it’s connection. You install it, no reboot needed, and then you create a hotspot name and password.

That’s it.

Once it’s up and running, in a few minutes, your other devices can connect to your personal hotspot. You have a local LAN and you can easily share files and access the Internet from all your devices.

A very cool tool. I have it on both of my Win7 laptops to run hotspots, separate names, so whichever one is connected can be my router and allow me high speed access for all my devices on one connection.

If my Internet connection works in the hotel.