A Philadelphia developer has rooted out an unfinished feature of Windows 7 that turns any laptop into a wireless access point, allowing other Wi-Fi-enabled devices to share the connection without special software.

Nomadio, which specializes in military network consulting and development, used the new "Virtual Wi-Fi" feature in Windows 7 to create Connectify, a free application that it released as a beta last Friday.

Virtual Wi-Fi was crafted in Microsoft's research group as a way to "virtualize" one wireless card as several separate adapters. The project was discontinued in 2006, but the work made its way into Windows 7 as "Native 802.11 Virtual Wireless Fidelity (Virtual Wi-Fi) object identifiers (OIDs)" .

"A year ago, Microsoft talked a lot about this as a big feature in Windows 7," said Alex Gizis, the CEO of Nomadio. "But driver support didn't get finished. The low-level code is in there, but the driver-level stuff isn't. And there's no app or setting in Windows to turn it on."

Explaining that the feature was "half there" in Windows 7, Gizis said his company realized "we have the rest of the software here, in our networking work."

Full Story at PC World

The beta of Connectify can be downloaded from Nomadio's Web site.

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