Windows 7: internet connection Sharing

Hi All

My laptop is running Windows 7 Home premium and is connected to my wireless ADSL router with the ins built wireless card. Now I've shared this connection and the LAN network card has been assigned an IP address of 192.168.137.1 and a subnet of 255.255.255.0 no other IP addresses have been set.

From what I understand I should be able to plug my other computer straight in to the windows 7 computer using a network cable and share the internet connection. But there is a problem with this. When I look in the "network and sharing center" on the windows 7 machine I can see the wireless connection has an internet connection but under the LAN connection it says "No internet connection" and when I do plug in the "client" it doesn’t get an IP assigned so obviously I can't browse the internet on it.

Any advice would be greatly received



Oh the other machin is an XP machine

I take it that your Windows XP machine has no wireless card.


Make sure that your ICS is activated on your Windows 7 computer.

1. Activate the Windows 7 ICS
2. Check the LAN NIC TCP/IP settings
a: TCP/IP 4 has to have: IP: 192.168.0.1
b:Subnet and Gateway can be left blank.
3. Plug a cable from your Windows 7 NIC to your Windows XP NIC
4. Modify your TCP/IP settings on your XP machine to read:
a: TCP/IP 4: IP: 192.168.0.2
b: Subnet: 255.255.255.0
c: Gateway: 192.168.0.1
d: DNS: You need to get this from your Windows 7 computer.

To obtain the DNS:
Go to your Windows 7 computer
under the RUN command type "cmd"
type ipconfig /all , hit enter

under your wireless connection, the one that pulls the internet.. You should find DNS numbers.
those numbers should be exact of what you will put in the XP machine.

Once you are done with the numbers, hit okay, okay, apply, whatever to get you out of the network settings page to apply everything

Or better yet, get yourself a basic 4-port Ethernet router. A router will allow all your computers to share your connection WITHOUT having to connect to a "host" computer that must be connected, and up and running.

But beyond that, a router provides a HUGE layer of security by as it assumes the IP address assigned by your ISP, and then it assigns the connected computers (or printer or NAS, etc) a unique ID, effectively hiding your system from the Internet.

Then I suspect you need a Ethernet "Crossover" cable.

A router would be the best way..... True True....


Now and days with NICS they can automatically switch whether or not they are using crossover or straight through. Isn't techology wonderful!

Now days, yes. But I quoted ascona's comment about the other machine being an XP machine to make that point - hardware designed in the day of XP is legacy hardware, and could be many years old.

In any event, a router is still the best bet - no sharing required - always better security that way.

ok so the shared machine is the lappy with wireless to the router for internet, than get that (wireless) connections properties and select the sharing tab, tick 'allow other computers to use this connection', (and personally i untick 'allow others to mess with my connection' selection) make sure the wired connection is set to auto find ip address and dns, and ICS will take care of the rest. (dont have the sharing options selected on the wired connection, just the wireless).
edit: you may need to reboot.
edit edit: damn this is gonna be cos u get your connection wireless through a router which is also giving you a LAN ip address, so you either have to disable that in the router and continue to use ICS or plug the xp box into the ethernet cable and keep using wireless for the lappy, which obviously isnt what u want.

Hi All

Finally got this working....thanks acurasd

I followed the steps you said and it still wouldnt work but I found the problem (in then end ) to be my McAfee firewall. It was blocking the 192.168.0.1 network so I just had to add the ip address range to the trusted networks and it work straight away.

Thanks again for the help

its always the firewall...