Page 744 - Windows 10 May 2019 Update The Missing Manual: The Book That Should Have Been in the Box

phone. Doing so lets you surf the web from your laptop in a hotel room, for

example, or share files with someone across the building from you.

Sometimes you just want to join a friend’s Wi-Fi network. Sometimes
you’ve got time to kill in an airport or on a plane that has Wi-Fi, and it’s
worth a $7 splurge for half an hour. And sometimes, at some street corners

in big cities, Wi-Fi signals bleeding out of apartment buildings might give
you a choice of several free hotspots to join. If you’re in a new place, and
Windows discovers, on its own, that you’re in a Wi-Fi hotspot, then the

icon sprouts an asterisk. And where is the icon? It’s in two places:

On the taskbar (Figure 12-4, top).

On the Quick Actions panel (hit the icon on the taskbar).

Figure 12-4 shows you how to proceed. Along the way, you’ll be offered
the “Connect automatically” checkbox; if you turn it on, you’ll spare

yourself all this clicking the next time your PC is in range. It’ll just hop on
that network by itself.

Tip

If you point to the taskbar icon without clicking, you see the network’s name. And if you
right-click the icon, you get links to a troubleshooting app and the Network & Internet Settings
pane.)

Most hotspots these days are protected by a password. It serves two
purposes: First, it keeps everyday schlumps from hopping onto that

network; second, it encrypts the connection so hackers armed with sniffing
software can’t intercept the data you’re sending and receiving.

When You Can’t Get On

There are a bunch of reasons why your icon might indicate that you’re in
a hotspot, but you can’t actually get online: