Extend the Range of your Home or Office Wi-Fi with Connectify!

In the video below, Connectify CEO and all-around tech-guy, Alex Gizis explains how to extend the range of any home or office Wi-Fi network using Connnectify. The best part? It's totally free! Just fire up your Windows 7 PC, and the Connectify software [available here], and you're ready to boost your Wi-Fi signal to reach the elusive guest bedroom or backyard bbq...

Haynie's Hypothesis Part 01: The Personal(ized) Computer

At Connectify, we're lucky to work with some of the smartest, quirkiest, and coolest people around. The one staff member who truly embodies all of those qualities is our lead engineer, Dave Haynie. Besides having developed some of the most iconic personal computers of the '80s and '90s, Dave is a seasoned musician, documentary filmmaker, and the kind of guy that'll give you a Wikipedia-like response to the most esoteric question. Anyway, Dave spends a lot of the day staring at complicated schematics and tiny circuit-boards, but we're hoping to pull him away twice-a-month, to write about whatever he wants to, in a guest column that we're going to call, Haynie's Hypothesis.

Hello, Connectify blog readers! My name is Dave Haynie, and I've been an engineer, on the team here since the beginning. It's also worth noting that I've been around the personal computer industry in one way or another, since its inception. When I was a kid, I used to work on crazy projects all the time. On one occasion, I built a bomb that blew a hole in our street (back when home bomb-making was a bit more socially acceptable). I also constructed a variety of vehicles, including rafts and rocket cars. Mostly, however, I was fascinated by electronics. I built a radio for a science project in fourth grade, a laser for the junior high science fair, and at least one digital clock, among other things, every year of high school. I can also recall a  whole series of attempts to make a working electronic drum, and another run of pretty successful shocking devices (each one delivering hundreds or thousands of volts into friends, my poor sisters, etc.) 

But along the way, I discovered computing, about as early as a kid could discover computing in those days. When I was twelve years old, my dad was able to let me access a scientific mainframe computer at Bell Laboratories, on the weekends. This was a class ‘time-share’ system: the computer was who-knows-where (somewhere in the old Bell Labs building in Holmdel, NJ, that once housed 10,000 employees... they're turning that into a shopping center I hear), and you accessed it via a printing terminal. I started with games, and got bored pretty quickly. So then I took them apart, and learned some BASIC and FORTRAN.

Gaming on-the-go, with Connectify!

Ever since its very first beta release, we’ve seen people use Connectify in some pretty unique ways. Recently, the gaming community has really embraced the capabilities of our software, using it to connect Playstations, Xbox 360s, and other consoles to the internet, where no wired connection is available. With only a mobile broadband card, or even just a tethered mobile phone, gamers are now able to bring their massively multi-player worlds with them, on-the-go.

In the video below, Connectify CEO [and card-carrying tech whiz] Alex Gizis explains how to Connectify an XBox 360 with a Cricket 3G mobile broadband card, to play Call of Duty: Black Ops online. We've always known that Connectify is capable of some amazing feats, but getting gamers out of the basement...



Streamline your life, with Connectify.

If 2010 has taught us anything, it’s that technology is becoming increasingly present in every aspect of our lives. More so than ever, we’re streaming our entertainment at the touch-of-a-button, interacting with friends via social media during our daily commute, and conducting business while enjoying an in-flight movie. Still, all this convenience does come at a cost. From juggling between several mobile devices, to wrangling wi-fi signals on-the-go, sometimes the headache can be as omnipresent as the technology itself. Fortunately, with Connectify and a Windows 7 PC, you can make the stress of networking disappear at the click-of-a-button. Here are some nifty tips for streamlining you life using Connectify in the new year:

Extend the range of your home or office network
Connectify comes in pretty handy when you’re trying to extend the range of an existing wi-fi network. Using the software as a repeater, you can significantly expand the reach of your home or office network. Connectify can get the internet up to your guest bedroom when the in-laws are in town, or make the web available in the backyard for your summertime barbecue.

Turn your mobile broadband card into a hotspot
Are you using a mobile broadband card to stay connected on-the-go? Set Connectify to re-broadcast this 3G/4G signal, and voila, you’ve got a mobile hotspot that any device can latch onto. Just think, now you can play multi-player XBox Live games anywhere you go... the possibilities are endless!

Get yourself Connectified
These days, we walk out the door carrying much more than just our cell phones. Even the least tech-savvy folks out there are now attached to their media players and wi-fi enabled cameras; not to mention laptops, netbooks, and iPads. When hotel wi-fi networks and expensive airport hotspots limit you to a single connection to the internet, it can be impossible to get all of these various devices online. However, with Connectify installed on a Windows 7 laptop, anyone can transform that single connection into a secure wi-fi hotspot that all of your devices can connect to simultaneously.

Offline Networking
Even without an active Internet connection, you can still run a Connectify hotspot. This provides wireless access to shared folders, printers, and drives on your network, as well as the ability to play LAN games with others.

Download the latest version of Connectify here, and tell us how you use Connectify to take the ‘work’ out of networking!

Posted by Raj