Basically for a short period of time I have my gaming PC too far away from the wireless router to connect it via ethernet. It has no wireless card either, so the only way I could connect to the internet would be through my laptop's wireless.

I have managed to make a connection between my PC and laptop via ethernet, but I have no idea how to share the wireless internet my laptop receives across to my PC?

I have googled a few articles but most are very long winded and rubbish.

Quote from DaveWS :

Basically for a short period of time I have my gaming PC too far away from the wireless router to connect it via ethernet. It has no wireless card either, so the only way I could connect to the internet would be through my laptop's wireless.

I have managed to make a connection between my PC and laptop via ethernet, but I have no idea how to share the wireless internet my laptop receives across to my PC?

I have googled a few articles but most are very long winded and rubbish.

Your computer will be further away than say, 50m?

I believe it's called a "bridge connection." Try Googling that, might be fruitful. I could never get it to work on my PC though, but it just simply hates wireless, always has. Wireless networks have never, ever, worked properly on it.

Quote from boothy :

Your computer will be further away than say, 50m?

Well no. My desktop is in a different room to the router, but I can obviously connect my laptop wirelessly to the router in the same room as the desktop. I can connect the laptop to the desktop via ethernet, so I'm hoping to be able to share the laptop's internet to the desktop.

Dave, if both PC and laptop run windows you would think it should be fairly simple, make sure both are on the same network group (MSHOME is standard) then go to network connections and enable ICS in the advance tab of the laptops internet connection, IIRC you have to be logged as administartor.

I think the network setup wizzard can also do this for you, but you might have to change the firewall settings also.

On your PC you might have to set the laptops network icon as a gateway so it knows where to connect to the internet.

takes a few restarts too IIRC its been a while since I did anything like this

Would it not be easyer to just borrow or buy a wireless card or USB dongle for your PC?

Good luck
SD.

If you have a mac you just click 'Internet Sharing' and bang, it does it. Cue Dustin.

Quote from DaveWS :

Well no. My desktop is in a different room to the router, but I can obviously connect my laptop wirelessly to the router in the same room as the desktop. I can connect the laptop to the desktop via ethernet, so I'm hoping to be able to share the laptop's internet to the desktop.

Meh, my suggestion was gonna be just a nice long bit of Cat5

This is really simple. What you do it is select both the wire and the wireless connection and choose bridge connection. That's how I did it when my router went kaput and had to use cable modems 1 jack with my pc and xbox360.

If I'm not mistaken, what you need is a crossover cable rather than a standard cat5. The ends are configured differently.

Quote from pb32000 :

If you have a mac you just click 'Internet Sharing' and bang, it does it. Cue Dustin.

It really is that easy. System Preferences -> Sharing -> Internet Sharing, and by default it is configured to share an Ethernet connection over the Airport (Wireless).

... and people say Mac's are difficult to use.

I don't think anyone has ever claimed Macs are hard to use, just expensive. They need to be easy to use for all those children and graphics designers.

why dont you just get one of those USB wireless receiver?

Quote from SparkyDave :

Dave, if both PC and laptop run windows you would think it should be fairly simple, make sure both are on the same network group (MSHOME is standard) then go to network connections and enable ICS in the advance tab of the laptops internet connection, IIRC you have to be logged as administartor.

I think the network setup wizzard can also do this for you, but you might have to change the firewall settings also.

On your PC you might have to set the laptops network icon as a gateway so it knows where to connect to the internet.

takes a few restarts too IIRC its been a while since I did anything like this

Would it not be easyer to just borrow or buy a wireless card or USB dongle for your PC?

Good luck
SD.

I ended up using the network setup wizard, which sort of worked. I now have both laptop and desktop connected, and my laptop's wireless connection tells me its sharing the internet, however I'm not getting an internet connection at my desktop PC.

Quote :

On your PC you might have to set the laptops network icon as a gateway so it knows where to connect to the internet.

This sounds like something I need to do to get it to work... can you please elaborate? Cheers.

P.S. I don't have a usb wireless card / dongle, and since this is temporary (a few weeks) I'm not gonna buy one either.

Quote from StableX :

If I'm not mistaken, what you need is a crossover cable rather than a standard cat5. The ends are configured differently.

Only if you're using an ancient network card. All 1Gb/s ethernet ports can connect to each other using standard CAT5 cabling.

Bridging connections never worked for me, what I did was right-click on the wireless network on the laptop, hit properties, and enable ICS on the ethernet port. I used this setup for over 6 months with no problems, when I had no wireless card for the PC

The problem I've got is worse than I thought. I can't even network the desktop and laptop together for file sharing. On my laptop I can see both the laptop and the desktop visible in the workgroup in my network places, but when I double click the desktop, it tells me "-PCname- is not accessible. You might not have permission blah blah blah". If anyone can help that'd be good thanks cos this is doing my ****ing head in!

Are they both running on the same workgroup, with sharing permissions set?

Yes.

Edit: I can now access my laptop from my desktop by searching the IP in "search for computers" in explorer, but no joy with anything else.

**** me. Excuse the language but christ, after 6+ hours of messing around with different settings, googling different stuff, etc, it's finally decided to work. I basically set everything back to scratch, and went through the ICS wizard once more on both PC's with restarts, and it works. Woop.

Well done Dave

Sometimes trial and error works, it just takes ages

your next problem will probably be when your on lap 7 of 8 and it decides to drop the connection :P just make sure you adjust the power saving settings so the laptop wont "turn off hard disks" after so many mins.

SD.

Dave,

For future reference. The reason you could connect when using the IP and not the "name" of your PC is most likely because somehow a protocol called NetBIOS was disabled on one or other of the machines. It's on as default so resetting everything would have turned it back on if it was off.

Ok thanks for explaining.