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Windows 7 Starter Edition allows wireless connection sharing

Windows 7 Starter Edition is known for being a cheap and rather limited version of Microsoft's operating system. It was believed that, amongst the features disabled, wireless connection sharing was cut, also. However, it's now been discovered that the feature is quite simply hidden, and not completely disabled.

The hidden feature was discovered by Rafael Rivera, on his Within Windows blog, as he was digging into some open source software bundled with netbooks, from an unnamed OEM. He explained, "This week, I was disassembling software that a major, to-remain-nameless OEM, put out for their netbook customers. I was ready to call them out on code that deliberately bypassed a licensed feature check in Windows, enabling ad-hoc wireless networking... but when I booted up an Eee PC, ad-hoc wireless networking worked out of the box."

Rivera continued to state that apparently you're still licensed to use the feature, but not licensed to use the shortcut to it. In order to get an ad-hoc network running on your Windows 7 Starter machine, you'll have to go through the tedious process of typing 'adhoc' into the Start Menu search bar.

It's believed that this is a mistake, and now that the news is out in the open, a fix will arrive shortly to help patch up the irregularity.

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