No internet connection after I turned my laptop into wifi hotspot

Good day,

Due to my coming posting to a place without a wifi connection for my tablet, I decided to turn my laptop into a wifi hotspot.

I googled and found this post:

How to turn your Windows 7 laptop into a wireless hotspot | News | TechRadar

I thought, "Hey, that's cool". So I did everything mentioned there to the letter. It worked, my laptop was able to create its own hotspot, which was well cool. I connected my tablet to the new wifi connection. It did work, but I had no internet connection. So I assume that whatever I did, it disconnected my wireless adapter to created the hotspot. So I thought, that's fine, I'll just use a network cable.

Now here's the real problem.
1) I disconnected the connection, but my wireless network on my laptop told me that I had no internet connection.
2) I checked my tablet and reconnected the tablet to my home wireless network. It worked fine. I'm posting this using my tablet on home wireless.
3) No issue with my laptop nor the hardware, because prior to following the tutorial, my wireless network works just fine.
4) I tried disabling the device in Network & Sharing. No difference.
5) I stopped hostednetwork. No difference.
6) I disallowed hostednetwork. No difference.
7) As a last ditched effort, I turned on the system restore and reverted back to an earlier point. That finally work. My laptop finally has an internet connection again.

So my question is, what actually happened here and if I encounter this again, what should I do apart from turning back to a restore point. Perhaps someone more experienced than me can shed me some light?

Thanks in advance.

To my knowledge the WiFi adapter work as either a connection point to a WiFi router/Wireless access point or AS a wireless Access Point, WiFi Hot Spot, but not both. So you would need to connect the notebook to a router (internet connection) with a Ethernet cable. Then the computer will take the internet from the Cable and send it out to connected devices.

Yes you can create the hosted wireless network and be online at the same time.

The Microsoft Virtual WiFi Adaptor is used to create the hosted network so you need to use a Windows 7 certified driver in order for the hosted wireless network to work as it should. The certified driver automatically installs the Microsoft Virtual WiFi Adaptor which is required to create the hosted wireless network. The Microsoft Virtual WiFi Adaptor should show up in Device Manager when it's installed correctly.

The link below shows both methods for creating a hosted wireless network. :)
Windows 7 Tip of the Week: Use Wireless Hosted Networking to Share An Internet Connection Wirelessly

strollin said:

You should be able to share your internet connection via the hotspot using either the wired or wireless connection. If I were you I would do a system restore back to a point prior to when you did the hotspot setup and see if you can get your wifi connection working again. Once you get that working, I recommend using the Virtual Router (from the OP's link) or Connectify (from Chev65's link) utilities to simplify the process with a nice gui that allows you to configure the hotspot very easily.

Quote from Op: 7) As a last ditched effort, I turned on the system restore and reverted back to an earlier point. That finally work. My laptop finally has an internet connection again.

Yep it worked.

All of this is very good but in the OPs original post he says nothing of having a Wifi network to connect the notebook to.

My point is if the notebook, with WiFi card, can get a connection to a Local WiFi signal, whether at home or in a public area (coffee house or whatever), then they should easily be able to connect his Tablet to that same WiFi signal.

Just why would you need to HotSpot a Notebook and have the WiFi card do double duty when there is already a WiFi network available?

Seems kind of Redundant to me. Just sayin.

edwar said:

All of this is very good but in the OPs original post he says nothing of having a Wifi network to connect the notebook to.

My point is if the notebook, with WiFi card, can get a connection to a Local WiFi signal, whether at home or in a public area (coffee house or whatever), then they should easily be able to connect his Tablet to that same WiFi signal.

Just why would you need to HotSpot a Notebook and have the WiFi card do double duty when there is already a WiFi network available?

Seems kind of Redundant to me. Just sayin.

I know just what you mean, it seemed silly to me as well because if there is already a WiFi connection why would you need the hot spot?

The Op did mention he was using wireless adaptor so it was easy to assume he was trying to share a wireless connection. I believe the problem was that the Op was not using a Windows 7 certified driver which would include the Microsoft Virtual WiFi miniport adaptor which is required to set up a hosted wireless network.

The only reason I can think of is that some people only have a modem with no router involved in which case setting up a hosted wireless connection or even a virtual router could actually be useful.

strollin said:

In the case where someone has a cellular broadband connection on their laptop then this could be used to share that connection as well. Another example would be that there is no WiFi hotspot but the laptop is connected via Ethernet. That connection can now be shared with devices that only have WiFi capability.

The case I can think of where you might want to do this where WiFi is available is when using paid wifi hotspots. In this case only one cinnection needs to be paid for but can be shared with multiple devices.

With a Cell 3/4G setup it can be done without the virtual adapter.

Yes if paid WiFi then yes.