A Shared Connection

So we are getting ready to head to the beach. 18+ hours in the car with the kids - and only my laptop will have an internet connection.

That is great for me - but how are the kids going to surf the web and keep up with IM while on the road. We won't have an internet connection for them at the beach, or the following week in Vermont.

So what is the answer? Share my laptop. NO WAY! But I am willing to share my EVDO high speed wireless connection.

I played with this a while back, but had nothing but problems getting it set up. It ended up totally messing up all of my connections.

So I figured that if I am going to give it a shot, I better play before we hit the road so that I will have some time to recover if necessary.

I found this excellent post months ago, just have not taken the time to give it a try.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/expert/bowman_02april08.mspx

Boy, it looks simple. But wasn't this what I tried on my own without instructions before?

Well, I gave it a shot and it worked right out of the gate. When I then turned on WEP, it crapped out and I could not get it back up. So tear it down, put it back to original, reboot and try once more.

Well this time it worked. WEP and all.

We will see how it holds up over the next two weeks on the road. Should be OK, as long as they don't try to download the current Harry Potter movie off torrent ;-)