OK, the holidays have started and you may be traveling to visit the relatives in a faraway or unfamiliar location.
You take your computer so that you can keep up with email, Facebook, your Tweets and your news and sports information. Gee, first of all what happened to the "good ole days" when you visited your relatives? Oh well, I guess we are more civilized now but don’t get me going on that.
Or let us say that you really are a "family-visiting" sort of person and you do want to visit and not spend your entire time with them texting and online. On your way to visit you go to a hotel and you need a Wi-Fi connection. You have your notebook and your Wi-Fi enabled and Wi-Fi tablet PC with you. When you get to the hotel you find they only have a wired connection. Well unless you are geekier than I am, you will not have a network cable with 
you. But since you need to connect you hope that they have a cable to lend you. An aside here; I experienced this very thing a year or two ago and they would "lend" me a cable…for $7.50 a night. What a rip-off, but don’t get me going on that one either. In that case you could connect your notebook but most likely not your tablet, phone or other non-cable ready devices.
The program we will look at today is Connectify (connectify.me). It will help to resolve this and some other situations for you. You can install Connectify on your Windows 7 PC or XP but it doesn’t work nearly as well with XP and has fewer features available. Once installed, you can set up your own Wi-Fi Hotspot.
This means after you plug into the network and download and install Connectify you can set up your own private wireless network. Yes, this makes it just like home with your Wireless setup. You will have a SSID (a network name) then you can use all of your other wireless devices to connect to your computer’s network and get online. This shares the connection all around with multiple devices.
There are other features available with Connectify but the one that interests me the most is only in the paid version. Check online for the price. (I once quoted a price in a column and when it was published the prices had gone up so go check it on the site.)
This other feature can be used to extend the local wireless router you are using, even your home’s router. OK, now I just lost some of you but here is the situation. Your wireless router is located in the, oh let’s say, Northeast corner of the basement. You can keep it hidden there and out of the way.
You notice every time you sit on your back porch (on the second floor, southwest corner of the house) to read a book, check email, surf the net, etc. your Wi-Fi connection is either gone or so weak you cannot do much. This is because the farther away from the wireless router you are, the weaker the signal. If you use Connectify Pro you can use your notebook computer as a signal extender. With that set up you can get much farther from your router since the notebook computer is now "extending" the distance of the broadcast signal. You could go way across the street or out to the backyard and still receive a strong signal.
As always, make sure you secure your wireless network to keep your connection yours.
