How to turn your laptop with Windows 10 into a WiFi hotspot

Today we live connected almost 24 hours a day, at home, at work or even on the street from your mobile. But sometimes, whether for leisure or work, we have to travel inside or outside Spain and things start to get complicated. If we stay within our country at least we will continue to have our data on the mobile, but when we want to use the laptop or we are outside of Spain the connection problems can be aggravated.

It is true that today there are a lot of public sites that offer a free WiFi network, but everyone knows the risks involved in using them. Therefore, there are many people who prefer to pay a little but enjoy a good connection and above all more secure.

This is something that can happen in a large majority of hotels, but we will find that they will charge us for each of the devices that we want to connect to the hotel's Wi-Fi network. To avoid this, we can enable one of our devices as a WiFi hotspot and thus enjoy connection in both only paying for one of them.

If you want to know how to turn your mobile into a WiFi hotspot, we recommend reading the news where we explain it step by step, but now we are going to focus on how to turn our laptop with Windows 10 into a Wi-Fi hotspot and share the network with our mobile or tablet to not spend the battery of our device.

For this, we can always use any tool that allows us to create WiFi hotspot in Windows 10, as is the case of Connection Hotspot, a great application that through its graphical interface will facilitate this task. If you want to know how to use it, here is everything you need to know in order to use it.

However, if you prefer not to be installing more and more tools on your laptop, we will show how to convert our Windows 10 computer into a WiFi hotspot without additional software, as the system itself allows it . To do this, the first thing we must do is access the network connections of the computer, something we can do quickly by pressing Win + R and typing the command ncpa.cpl.

This will open a new window with the WiFi networks to which the equipment is connected. By clicking with the right mouse button on the connection that we are using and choosing the option of Properties, we will see a new window in which we must go to the tab of Sharing and mark the option Allow users of other networks to connect through of this computer's Internet connection. Once this is done, click on the OK button to save the changes.

From this moment, we are ready to configure the wireless network, and for this we will use the command line. Therefore, we have to open a command prompt window with administrator permission by right-clicking on the Windows icon in the Start menu and selecting the Command Prompt (administrator) option.

Now, we will have to use the netsh command in this way: netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode = allow ssid = "network name" key = "network password". In the name and password of the network, we will have to indicate the name and password of the network to which we want to connect from other devices. If all goes well, we will see how a message is displayed that the network mode was changed as well as the name and password.

Once we have created the access point, we are ready to start issuing our own network and for this we will have to execute the command: netsh wlan start hostednetwork.

If the command is executed correctly we will be shown a message that the hosted network was started, and if we want to see the channel it uses and the users that are connected, we can know it by executing the following command: netsh wlan stop hostednetwork.


At that time, we have finished creating our access point in the Windows 10 laptop and therefore it is only necessary that from our devices look for the WiFi network offered by the computer, connect to it as if it were another network and start to enjoy the Internet connection from the devices we want without using the data or pay more for each of the devices that are taking advantage of the original WiFi connection.