WiFi connections and management - Hotspots and Home LANs

Connecting to Wireless Networks

I have an HP iPaq 112 Windows Mobile 6 PDA. It has wireless networking or
"WiFi" enabled.

I have configured it to connect to my home network and from there out onto
the internet. Apparently these things are also popular for connecting to
wireless "hotspots", say at McDonalds restaurants, airport lounges and so
on.

This week I've been experimenting with it. It took me some time to figure
out how to get it to successfully connect to my own network, then from
there more fiddling and settings changing in order to either see local
network resources or to access Internet services.

The help menus are not that helpful unfortunately in troubleshooting this
stuff.

Today, when out and about, while waiting for my wife I sat in the car and
opened up Wireless Networking and turned it on. It detected two networks,
one, a secured network and a second one which was open.

I connected to the open network. I then tried browsing. No go. Couldn't
locate any websites.

I then started the practice of settings changing til eventually I got it
to browse successfully. Unfortunately it was slow and a lot of sites
wouldn't load. This may have been due to network restrictions or filters,
perhaps. I have no idea whose wifi network it was as it was merely titled
"dlink", presumably based on the name of the wireless access point that I
was connected to.

One of the settings that I had to change was on the wireless network
adaptor. I changed it to "server assigned" settings, indicating that the
wireless network was a DHCP enabled one. My home network is based on fixed
IP addresses and fixed DNS server addresses.

When I got home I had to go through the rigmarole of reconfiguring it back
onto my home LAN.

How do people go about changing their settings on the fly so that each
time they connect to different hotspots or networks that the PDA
automatically is assigned the correct settings? Presumably each airport or
Starbucks or McDonalds or whatever which offers wifi hotspots all have
different settings.

It would be a pain if you had to go in and change things every time you
wanted to connect to a different network, particularly for users of these
devices who aren't computer or network literate.

Exploring Local Network Resources

Under file explorer there is an option "open path". I've used this at home
to connect to and browse hard disks on my computers that are connected to
the network. I tried this on this particular network. That is until I
discovered that it doesn't offer the ability to search for available
resources.

I'd like to do this on my own network as I had to go and write down the
names of the computers and their hard disk names in order to browse them
on the PDA. Thing is, it doesn't accept wildcards nor does it offer to do
a search like what you do in My Network Places on a desktop/laptop
computer.

Is there any way of doing this on a Pocket PC/Windows Mobile PDA?


--
There are only two ways of dealing with women and neither of them work.
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