Trouble connecting my Windows laptop to iPhone hotspot

Craig95005 · May 27, 2011

Hi. I bought my new iPhone last week. I believe that I have it properly set up to serve as a personal hotspot. I've been unable to get my Windows laptop, which is maybe 7 years old, to connect to this hotspot. It usually (but not always) sees it in the list of wireless providers, but when I try to connect, it isn't able. I have successfully connected a Macbook to my hotspot, so I can assume my iPhone is putting out good WiFi signals, right? I guess what I'm asking is whether any of you have found it easy to connect Windows laptops to your iPhone personal hotspot, or whether this is a common problem. I know this isn't a Windows forum, but if the problem is indeed with my laptop, is this something that might be corrected by installing a new WiFi thingy in it?

nyeates · May 27, 2011

We have had this same problem too. Can connect mac via wifi fine, but has issues on older win PC with XP on it.

The name of the wifi access point form the phone is "Susan asasx's iPhone" and the appostraphe would show u all weird on windows. This is stated as a known issue by apple, on windows machines. We tried renaming the device by plugging the iphone into a mac with itunes and renaming it by clicking on the device in itunes and hitting enter and typing in a new name. Then we turned off all wifi and turned back on. This did rename the wifi name to a simpler "Susan", but it didnt help the windows machine.

The windows machine has some craptastic 3rd party IBM driver software on it to handle wifi connections. I think this may be getting in the way.

Ive seen now many many issues with wifi and I think many of them have to do with how the wifi is expecting authentication and security to be handled..... there might be minute differences between WPA2 and WPA2 PKI authentication types, or there might even be differences in how Microsoft auths to a WPA2 encrypted auth server and how Mac does it. Its pretty advanced stuff that even mac and verizon techs dont know details on.

if you can update wifi drivers or the software that controls your wifi (for us, IBM has some of its own software on top the OS to do stuff like wifi connecting), then you should def upgrade this.

Let us know if you figure anything out.

Craig95005 · May 27, 2011

nyates, I saw the same kind of weird characters in place of an apostrophe and did exactly what you did - renaming the iPhone device through iTunes to a straight no-punctuation name - and likewise to no avail. Nice to know that I'm not the lone wolf here. My wife and I are going on a six month motorhome trip and are hoping to use the iPhone as internet source for our laptops whenever we're not in range of a wireless source otherwise, so it's kind of critical. I'll be buying a new laptop - probably Windows, because of the cost - and will try to audition it before purchase to make sure it works. I'll have a computer guy look at my existing laptop and let you know if I figure out how to correct the problem.

bingoldsby · Jun 2, 2011

Craig,

Do this: Go to Start <> Run <> and type CMD - or look for the dos utility in Programs <> Accessories. In the dos box type: ipconfig /release and then ipconfig /renew - All this while you have the computer's WiFi adaptor enabled and online, AND the phone's hotspot feature enabled.

Let me know if that makes it work. It has helped me with connect difficulties of a similar nature.

By the way, what phone, carrier, and tether method (native from the carrier or some Jailbreaked app?)..

Brian

Hope this isn't a "stale" reply.

Craig95005 · Jun 9, 2011

bingoldsby, thanks for the suggestion, which I didn't see until I came back to the forum. In the meantime I've solved the problem by updating the Intel wireless driver, which didn't help, and then doing a full Windows update, including Service Pack 3, which corrected things. I hadn't used that laptop for a while so hadn't done a Windows update in quite a while.