Are you interested in connecting your computer to a wireless internet connection? There are plenty of ways that you can do that.A hotspot is an area where a person has their internet connection running through a wireless network, if there isn’t a password associated with their network then you can connect to it.

Once you begin using a Wi-Fi internet connection, I guarantee you won’t want to budge from it.The mobility and luxury of going anywhere within the range of the wireless network is just excellent and the speeds are also unbelievable.There are more than 120,000 worldwide public hotspots that will allow you to connect your notebook computer to for no price, which doesn’t count private home networks, but the user certainly has plenty of areas to choose from. Many cities around the world are evolving to a new form of Wi-Fi, which is also called a Wi-Fi cloud, which basically means that a city will hook up Wi-Fi all around their area so that anyone can access it.This would mean that nobody would need to purchase internet for themselves, only a network card so they could access the Wi-Fi cloud.Follow along so that you can learn yourselves on how to connect to a wireless network aka Wi-Fi.

The first thing you will need is a notebook computer.You may use a regular PC, but they aren’t very portable, so we will go along with a notebook instead.The next thing you will need is a Wi-Fi Adapter, which will allow you to connect to the Wi-Fi network.Many new laptop computers come equipped with a Wi-Fi Network Adapter, but many people enjoy the external PCMCIA cards, they tend to get a better connection.If you have one of these cards, please move onto the next step.If not, please go to a store and purchase the needed equipment.All new computers have the ability to connect a wireless card, if they do not come with one already, so once you have done so, move onto the next step.

Now that you have purchased all of the hardware needed to connect to a wireless hotspot.There are certain places where you can go that offer Wi-Fi, Starbucks and McDonalds are great places to start, with Starbucks being the ideal first spot.Your computer will find Wi-Fi hotspots if there is one around, but you need to activate the feature first.On your Windows computer, there will be a little computer with three waves coming out of it; this will be your wireless signal strength icon.Right click the little computer icon and hit “View Available Wireless Networks”, this will bring up all of the available Wi-Fi networks in your area, which might be pretty long, depending on where you are.The next thing you must do is look for the SSID (Access-Point Name) that corresponds to that particular Wi-Fi location.You can naturally look for this at the Wi-Fi location or you can search on your computer for this information.Most of the time, there will be a little sign on the wall that will let you know what the SSID is.Make sure that you choose an unsecured network, because if it is secured, it will require a password and that normally means that the owners do not want to access that particular network.Normally, a public hotspot location is unsecured, so there will be no encryption key needed in order to access the Wi-Fi network.

Once you have located the available hotspot SSID, click the connect button and wait for “Connected”.If it does, you may check the status of the signal, etc.Once this is finished, you should be able to access the internet and such.On a Mac, this process is much easier, just select the SSID from your AirPort menu and that’s all.

One more step before you can access the internet completely.Most hotspot locations are free, but they still require you to login, so that they could monitor what you are doing.This isn’t a form of “invasion of privacy”, but they do need to know what is going on in their location.If the location does not require you to login, you don’t have to worry about it, but if they do, you’ll need to get a subscription from their location.