Extend your wireless router's signal with no additional hardware!

No additional hardware needed! Say you have your wireless router in the office of your house, directly above or below the office the signal is great, but when you reach out to the far corners, there’s such a low signal or even no signal at all that you can’t even browse or check your email.  Even running a ping yields packet loss.  If your computer already has a wireless card and Windows 7, you can magically give your wireless router a boost from that room above or below the office, extending the range of the signal to areas of your home or office that were dead zones before.

Microsoft has been working on a software layer called Virtual Wifi (VWifi for short) for a while now, and it appears to have made a hidden entrance in Windows 7.  The layer abstracts your wireless card’s hardware into multiple virtual adapters, enabling your Windows 7 machine to become a wireless access point while it’s connected to your router via wireless using the same adapter! Best of all, it’s surprisingly easy to set up:

Create a Virtual Wifi AP in Windows 7

  1. First off, you’ll need to open a command prompt with administrative privileges.  From the Start menu, just type in ‘cmd’ or ‘command prompt’, right-click it, and select ‘Run as administrator’.
    Run a command prompt as administrator
  2. Type in the following to create a VWifi adapter and start it, using the ssid and key of your choice:
    netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=MyExtenderSSID key=mypass01
    netsh wlan start hostednetwork
    Create the VWifi adapter and start it.

    VWifi adapter appears in Network ConnectionsMagically, Windows has created a second wireless adapter for you, which you can now use as a wireless access point like your router for other devices to connect to, and using ICS (Internet Connection Sharing), you can share the internet connection on your *real* wireless adapter to your Microsoft VWifi adapter, enabling any computers or devices that connect to your VWifi access point to be online!

  3. Enable ICS on your wireless adapterNow you can share your internet connection using ICS.  Open up Network Connections and right-click your wireless adapter that currently has internet, select Properties and click the Sharing tab, and enable the option to share the internet connection.  If necessary, select the VWifi adapter as the interface to use for sharing.

And that’s it! [easy-as-123-joke here]
Now the signal from your wireless router is given a little boost in the direction of your computer to allow other computers or devices to connect if they were struggling or couldn’t before!