For the first time in years, I’m using a Windows PC as my main computer. It’s Windows 8.1 and thanks to a great introduction video the transition was quite nice. Of course there are things that I miss and keep doing wrong (right-click… had forgot all about that one), but overall I’m happy.
The first main thing that I ran into was when I was planning on sharing my internet connection so that my phone could use it. Nothing strange really. I do that several times a day on my MacBook Pro. And it’s dead-simple too. Click the Network-symbol and go “Create network…”, give it a name (and optional password) and you’re done. So you can imagine that I was surprised when I started to search for this in Windows 8.1. It was guides on how to use DOS-commands and other configuration. Or stuff that I should download and install (and that ended up crashing on me anyway).
After a few hair pulls and, yes I admit, some screaming, I got around to a solution that at least works. Even though it’s not simple. I wouldn’t let my mom do this. And she could probably set up an shared connection on a Mac Book.
There’s a post that describe this approach in great detail and much better than me, so this is the short version + my gotchas.
First, create a .bat-file with the following content.
This will create the hosted network (or hotspot if you want). The big gotcha here is that you need to run this under Administrative privileges. But that’s easy now that you have a .bat-file. Right-click it and pick “Run as Administrator”.
Oh yeah, remember to turn the WiFi on as well. If not you’ll see a pretty decent error message so it’s not biggie:
The wireless local area network interface is powered down and doesn’t support the requested operation.
Let them use internet
Well, that was not so hard, you think to yourself. And so did I. But now we actually need to let the hosted network use internet. Yes, I don’t really know what it’s is in this stage, but it doesn’t have internet access. It’s just another network adapter. Probably named “Network connection 24” or something.
Here’s what you need to do:
