Easily Turn Windows 7 Computer Into WiFi Hotspot to Share Wireless Internet Connection

Most of the recent laptops and netbooks already comes with wireless capability allowing you to connect to wifi hotspots. Previously I’ve written a few guides (XP, Vista, Hotspot) on how to share the wireless Internet connection without a wireless router. Let’s say you have a direct connection to the Internet via network cable and the computer has a wireless adapter. Since your computer is connected via cable, the wireless adapter will not be in use and it is possible to make the wireless adapter to share the Internet connection that you are getting from the cabled connection. This saves you from spending money in buying a wireless router.

However, the steps are quite long are involves a lot of steps. Moreover there are also many different network configurations
and the steps that I’ve written might not work for you. Good news is I found a free software called Connectify which is able to “EASILY” turn your Windows 7 computer into a wireless router with only one click. Trust me, sharing an internet connection using your wireless adapter cannot get any easier than this!

1. Fill up this form to obtain the Connectify download
link. The page mentioned that the link will be sent to the e-mail address but

2. Download and install Connectify. (The installer ConnectifyInstaller.exe is only 1.41MB in size)

3. Select the Internet connection you wish to share (My internet connection is coming from Local Area Connection and Connectify automatically selected it)


4. Choose a name for your new wireless network (You can leave it as Connectify)

5. Choose a wireless passphrase (You will to enter a wireless password that contains at least 8 characters)

6. Press the Internet Sharing button to turn on your wireless network

Now, from your other devices, you can see your wireless network. Choose to join it, and enter the wireless passphrase to connect.

Your wireless hotspot created with Connectify is encrypted with WPA2-Personal (AES) encryption by default and you cannot turn it off. Your security is as strong as the Passphrase that you select.

Although this guide ended up with 6 steps, but in short you only need to download and install Connectify, set the passphrase and click a button. I think I can do that all in less than 5 minutes. Connectify is a real WiFi Access Point running on your computer and it’s not an ad-hoc mode. Any device that can connect to a regular access point, can connect to a Connectify Hotspot, with no special setup or software required. Do note that Connectify is still in beta and some old wifi adapter cannot work. I’ve tried setting up connectify with D-Link DWA-110 and it couldn’t work. But when tested on a built-in Intel wireless adapter, it works perfectly.

Connectify is free and runs only on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 r2, both in either 32 or 64 bits. It is not made for XP or Vista. Most ISP doesn’t allow you to resell your internet connection. However if you are sharing the cost with your neighbor, then I believe it should be fine.

Monitor Internet Bandwidth Usage with iTraffic Monitor

Some of you might be using an Internet plan from your ISP which has limited bandwidth. As far as I know, ALL of the wireless broadband in Malaysia allows unlimited usage BUT there is a fair usage threshold where once you go over the limit, your connection speed will be throttled to a very slow dial-up speed. I have a Celcom wireless broadband subscription and they offer two types of plan which is 384Kbps or 3.6Mbps. Both package allows you to download stuff at maximum speed but once you reached 5GB limit PER month, then you’re screwed with a really slow speed. Honestly it doesn’t make any sense to subscribe a 3.6Mbps download speed when you can only use 5GB of the bandwidth per month. The worst part is even the uploading bandwidth is counted to the usage.

At least they now tell us in advanced that there is a fair usage policy because last time they never expose this information publicly and you can only find it in their really long list of terms and conditions page which no one really reads. When you find out that there is a fair usage policy and file a complaint, they blame you for not reading the terms before signing up. For those that are subscribed to an internet connection package which has limited bandwidth usage, it is important that you keep track of your bandwidth usage. Here’s a free internet traffic monitoring software that works.

iTraffic Monitor is a network monitor and reporting tool. It provides real time graph of network traffic. Detailed stats provide daily/weekly/monthly/yearly stats. Stop watch, Session stats.

• Monitor and review your Internet or network bandwidth usage with ease
• How fast your internet connection? We can graph it for your review
• How much data do you transfer? We show you a real-time graph or numerical display, as well as daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly reports
• Requires minimal desktop space and system resources

This is how iTraffic report looks like. It’s easy to read and nothing too fancy or complicated.

iTraffic Monitor is relatively new as this is their first version released on 4/22/2009. A few small bugs here and there such as copying the report to clipboard generates an access violation error but it’s no big deal and hopefully they’ll fix it in their next release. What I like about iTraffic Monitor is it can filter out local network traffic or traffic between specific IP addresses. This is very important for people connected to the internet via a local area network (LAN). Very few network monitors can do this and the ones that do usually is a shareware that cost money.

This software is free and takes less than 2MB memory while monitoring your bandwidth usage. Claims to work on all Windows.

[ Download iTraffic Monitor ]

EASEUS Todo Backup Free Disk Imaging Software (Norton Ghost Alternative)

Macrium Reflect is a great software to create a full backup of your hard drive or partition so that you can restore it back exactly the way it was when you created the backup. I have the full version of Macrium Reflect installed on my Acer laptop running Windows 7 and I find it very useful whenever I want to install and test any software because I can first create a full backup and then if anything goes wrong, I can simply restore it back. FYI, I never used System Restore and that’s the first thing I disable after installing Windows :P Don’t ask why, I just prefer to put my trust in disk imaging rather than Windows System Restore. Recently I got to know another disk cloning software which is FREE from EASEUS called Todo Backup.

EASEUS Todo Backup is comprehensive backup software, which not only provides convenient user-interface to simplify your tasks but also enables you to backup and restore an image of your partitions or entire hard disk. EASEUS Todo Backup enables users to backup and restore data in multiple ways for their data security. At the same time, for user-friendly operation, EASEUS Todo Backup also provides journaling.

Let’s check out EASEUS Todo Backup…

The main function for EASEUS Todo Backup is Backup, Restore, Check image file, Mount, Unmount and Clone disk. When I say backup, it doesn’t mean backing up a files or folders. It means backing up the entire current state of your computer into a file. For example, let’s say you created a full backup on 1st January 2009. Then after 8 months of messing around with Windows, it became very corrupted and unable to boot up. So now you restore back the Windows using the image that you created 8 months, it actually gives you back Windows the way it was when you created the image on 1st January 2009. Get it?

The program itself is pretty self explanatory. When you launch the program, you will see 3 main big buttons which is Backup, Restore and Clone. Mount is for mounting the image file as a virtual physical partition to explore or copy files in the backup image.

EASEUS Todo Backup also includes a Media Builder where it allows us to create a bootable CD/DVD. I’d say that the bootable disc is a must to create because most of the time you’ll only need to restore your computer is when you cannot boot up Windows. To create bootable media, run Todo Backup 1.0 Media Builder wizard by selecting “Tools” and “Create Bootable CD”. You can also run Bootable Media Builder without loading Todo Backup 1.0 by selecting “Programs”-> “EASEUS Todo Backup 1″-> “Bootable Media Builder” from the Start menu. You can also directly burn a bootable disc from the ISO image file located in C:\Program Files\EASEUS\EASEUS Todo Backup 1.0\bin\image.iso. When you boot up the computer with the boot CD, you should see a screen like the image below.

Just like Macrium Reflect, Todo Backup 1.0 bootable CD can ONLY restore and does not create backups. The backup can only be done in Windows…

I tried creating an image on my desktop running Windows XP Professional SP3 that’s taking up only 2.55GB of space. I saved the image to my second hard drive. The backup with no compression took 1 minute, 10 seconds to complete and image file size is also 2.55GB since the compression is disabled. Then I tried the normal compression, it took 3 minutes, 43 seconds to complete and compressed the file size to 1.28GB. As for restoration, the not compressed image took 4 minutes and as for the normal compression image took 4 minutes, 25 seconds. Looks like the compression only speeds up the backup process and not much on the restore.

Todo Backup v1.0 supports Windows 2000 (SP4), XP (32 and 64 bit), Vista (32 and 64 bit), Server 2003 (32 and 64 bit), and Server 2008 (32 and 64 bit). Verified not working on Windows 7 because I tried creating a backup and my computer crashed.

[ Download EASEUS Todo Backup ]

Enable Disabled Buttons in Windows with Enabler

There are times when Windows or a software doesn’t allow us to click a button. It could be a shareware that only after registering the button would be enabled or a feature that doesn’t make any sense if it was enabled. For example, if you run Windows Task Manager, go to the Users tab and click on the user that you are currently logged on as, the Send Message button is disabled. This sending message feature is useful if there are a few users logged on and you can send a message to another user but there is no logic in sending the message to yourself. That explains why the Send Message is disabled for currently logged on user.

Jack ONeill, the owner of EvilFingers has created a simple free tool called Enabler that can enable any disabled or grayed out buttons in Windows. There is no requirement or need for privilege escalation because this will enable any button on the user’s windows and there is no requirement to be a root or super user for enabling the buttons.

Here is a simple proof of concept on how Enabler works. Right click on Windows Taskbar and select Task Manager. Click on the Users tab and then select the current logged on user. The disconnect and Logoff button is enabled but the Send Message button is not accessible. Keep Windows Task Manager open and do not close it.

Now run Enabler and click the Enable button.
Click OK when you get a confirmation window saying that it’s Done.

Go to the Windows Task Manager again and you should see that the Send Message button can be used. Try clicking the Send Message button, type any message and click OK. A new message window should appear with the message that you’ve written.

It is important to make sure that the user is in focus/selected after enabling the button. Once you click on other areas and then you go back to the user again, the button will be disabled and you have to use Enabler to bring it back. If Enabler doesn’t work for you, then perhaps you can try DM2 or TurnItOn.

[ Download Enabler ]

Saving What You Typed in Firefox or Wordpress Locally To Your Computer

If you’ve noticed, when you are in the midst of writing or composing an email in Gmail or Hotmail, it will automatically help you save it in draft every few minutes. When you’ve finished composing and send the email, the draft will be deleted because a copy has been saved in your Sent folder. This is a great feature because there are many things that can cause the message to be unrecoverable. I have a mouse with 5 buttons and the side ones are for going back and forward. Sometimes the page will just go back by itself and I can lose everything that I typed. Yeah I dropped the mouse a couple of times or probably was too frustrated that I slammed the mouse on the table… But with the autosave to draft, I can always get back mostly what I’ve typed.

When my mouse goes bonkers and makes the browser goes back by itself during me writing a blog post, I am still safe from it because WordPress is bundled with the open source HTML WYSIWYG editor TinyMCE, and if I hit the back button, I will get a warning saying “Are you sure you want to navigte away from this page? The changes you made will be lost if you navigate away from this page. Press OK to continue, or Cancel to stay on the current page.“. Last week I lost about 90% of what I’ve written on Avira and I was really upset about it because I’ve spent the whole day testing and writing about it. Wordpress has a built-in auto save draft feature as well but it didn’t work because so coincidentally the site was having some down time. When I hit the Save Draft button for final saving and the page went blank. Hitting the back button gave me an empty draft! To prevent this from happening again, this is what I’ve implemented.

I have 2 choices, either to use a desktop blog-publishing application
or a Firefox plugin.

I found out that Windows Live Writer has a feature where I can automatically save draft to my local computer. So if the Internet
or the website is down, I will still have a recoverable local copy of the draft on my computer. However this feature is not enabled by default. You will need to go to Tools > Options > Editing > check “Automatically save drafts every X minutes”.

ever lose what you’ve written ever again! Well this is useful only for those that uses blog providers such as Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal, Movable Type, dasBlog and etc. It won’t work on emails or any other web forms.

[ Download Windows Live Writer ]

Another method would be using a Firefox plugin called Lazarus. It enables you to recover lost forms with a single click. Lazarus securely saves forms as you type, allowing you to safely recover your lost work after server timeouts, network issues, browser crashes, power failures, and all the other things that can go wrong while you’re entering forms, editing content, writing webmail, etc, …

You will of course need a Firefox browser and then install Lazarus plugin. It works right out of the box but then you can configure the extra Options to suit your needs.

[ Download Lazarus Firefox Plugin ]