September 16, 2004 - This wireless toolkit is for you

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Well, Service Pack 2 is just not letting me get back to the other stuff I am working on. Microsoft has revamped the wireless configuration system in the new Service Pack, with an interface that is designed to be easier to use for the average person. Unfortunately, this still seems to be too complicated for some people. Luckily, Microsoft provided us with a "solution."

When you open the 'View Available Wireless Networks" panel, you will notice a link in the network tasks to a wizard to "Setup a wireless network." This wizard takes us through a relatively straight-forward wizard to setup your networks SSID and WEP Encryption key. It also gives you options for WPA. Here is where the quotations come in. You can save this configuration to a thumb drive, take the drive to any computer, and run the application that has been copied to the drive to configure each computer. My only problem is, you can only save it to a flash drive. I would really love to be able to save it to a folder, that I could say, share on the network?

Well, after some poking around, it turns out after you make the thumb drive, it's not too difficult to modify it, and I've decided to offer the wepkey installer here. Simply extract the files to a folder and modify the files \Smrtntky\Wsetting.txt and \Smrtntky\Wsetting.wfc. Change the SSID and Network Key to match your particular configuration. Now you have a simple program that you can save to any media and anyone can configure their computer to be on the network you created. It's the perfect thing for those in-laws and relatives that just can't configure their PC's but want the luxury of wireless.