unwired (goodbye to tangles?)

I just recently acquired my first laptop. It's a Toshiba Satellite M200, a basic entry-level laptop. It came with Windows Vista home Basic.

Naturally, the first thing I did when I got it was to disable all of Vista's eye-candy, since they would only get in the way of any design or development work I planned on doing on the laptop (it only had 1Gig of RAM, and no dedicated Graphics Card).

Next came the task of trying to decide how to connect it to my desktop, and through that, the whole world. I initially thought that I needed to purchase a wireless router and a wireless adapter for my desktop, and set up my home network that way, so I went out to try and catch the hardware shop before they closed for the day. Unfortunately, I can't run that fast. So I decided to go home and do some research instead.

After several minutes on google I found out that the set-up I had pictures was not the only way to wirelessly connect to the internet. There was a cheaper, and easier way to go online. And it only involved buying a wireless adapter for my PC.

The next morning I went out and bought the cheapest wireless LAN card I could get. It was a USB dongle type thing. I then tried to set up an ad hoc connection hosted by my home PC, and connected to that from my laptop.

My laptop was now connected to my descktop. I could share files and folders, and watch movies I had on my PC from my laptop. The only thing I couldn't do was surf the Internet.

Luckily, I already had an existing proxy solution set up, since my parents sometimes dial-up to my PC from their place, and use the proxy to pass through to my internet connection.

A few configuration tweaks later on my laptop's wireless adapter, I was good to go. I could now browse the internet while taking a shower, although I wouldn't exactly recommend it. Who knows what kinds of germs are in the bathroom that could get into the laptop?

It could catch a virus, for all we know.