Nintendo Wii WiFi Adapter

Guffrey

I am thinking of buying my sister's old laptop, just to have something to do homework on in my room. The problem is, we don't have wirless internet in the house. So, assuming my sister's laptop has a wireless internet card (I need to check), I figured I could just buy a wifi adapter and get it online that way. The only one I've seen for sale around here is the Nintendo wii one, and Im guessing it would work, but I wanted to check here first. I'd hate to buy it then realize for some reason it only worked for DS's and wii's.

apotheos

It should work fine - but it adds a wireless bridge to your wired internet. The laptop doesn't need wireless, it uses the WiFi dongle to communicate wirelessly with the Wii/DS and shares its cabled internet connection.

Fristle

You could buy the laptop (assuming it does have its own wireless adapter), connect it to your gateway (or wired-only router), and use Internet Connection Sharing to bridge the wired side to the wireless side, providing WEP or open access on the wireless side. No need for the Nintendo adapter.

If the laptop doesn't already have a wireless adapter, I would still buy a normal 802.11g adapter (card or USB dongle) rather than the Nintendo adapter. Because the normal adapter can get your laptop online if and when you do have wireless access points nearby, whereas the Nintendo adapter is only good for a bridge. It cannot function as a normal adapter (to my knowledge). Also it is 802.11b only (ghetto), only works in Windows (boooo) and cannot even do WPA security (super booooo).

Zek

You're asking if you can use the Wifi Adapter to get a laptop online, right? Ordinarily it's not possible but I think there's an unofficial patch that turns it into a normal USB router. You're better off finding a regular one on Newegg or something though, it'll probably be cheaper too.

Guffrey

As always, thanks for the quick and helpful responses. I'll definately be looking at my options now.