Laptop internet access

I know this is a daft question, but if you take your laptop away with you,
how do you get internet access, is it somehow connected to your home pc,
and to do with wireless routers ?I know you can plug it in, but you have to
pay someone for it.
Please excuse my ignorance.

I was asked this question by a friend in Tenerife who had taken his lap top

Tickettyboo...

Not a daft question at all!
Okay, its not connected to your home pc at all..too far away for that.

I take my laptop away with me. A lot of hotels have wifi access and if you
have a wifi card in your laptop then you just switch it on, it picks up
the hotel signal and off you go. Some hotels 'may' have their wifi
password protected and will give you the password if you ask, and some
others may make a charge for the connection ( again they will tell you if
you ask and it would be payable to the hotel) I have used wifi access a
lot - particularly in the US and most hotels don't charge for it ( well,
it will be built in to the room price, they aint charities)

Other places have sockets in the room where you would plug in a cable (
like the cable you would use to plug into a router at home)

Connecting to a dial up ( plugging an ordinary dial up lead into the phone
socket in the room) is a very expensive way to do it..lots of hotels
charge a premium for phone calls..and will be just about impossible unless
you have an isp payg account in the country you are in. Very few ( if any)
isps have a contract type account dial up number that is accessible from
abroad..and the cost of the call would be a lot anyway

Then there are places that use a commercial type of wifi access..where you
buy airtime maybe on a card at reception and that would give you x amount
of time for a connection. I have only seen that in a couple of uk hotels
and it was pricey :-(
Similar sort of systems exist in public places like airports etc
will give you some sort of idea.

It 'may' be difficult to send mail, for instance if your only mail account
is with your isp..they like you to be connected to them before they let
you use their smtp server..though webmail should be fine. Receiving mail
into your OE or whatever, will work though, that doesn't give a hoot who
you are connected to

Oh and sometimes, you can switch your laptop on and it will pick up a
signal from a wifi router in someone's home nearby. In theory you can
connect using that, but I wouldn't do it for long cos its using someone
else's connection..if they have security on their router you won't pick
the signal up.

phew! that was a lot, sorry, but hope it helps you to understand .

Linedancer...

Wow, that was a lot of typing for you, that's been explained pretty well
Boo, thank you, I will print it out, 'cos I shall probably not remember all
that ;-)

It has helped me to understand, so you just need a wifi card in your laptop
and away you go, that's great :-)

Jeff Gaines...

Many hotels offer Internet access via a wired/wireless connection
nowadays, usually at a cost! You may need to make a couple of
adjustments to your network settings, and then re-set them when you get
home. There's also Internet cafes - but they usually provide the
computer equipment themselves.

If you stay in a place without Internet access you may be able to dial
up but you would need to sort out an ISP in advance and I have a
feeling the modem connector is slightly different in the USA (and
possibly other countries).

Rabbit...

All my modem cables ( and I've collected a few) have a USA fitting and need
an adaptor to fit our telephone sockets.

Jeff Gaines...

But I was talking about English connectors :-))

Rabbit...

Nah Alexander Graham Bell would have made then Scottish :-)

You don't actually connect back to your own PC, you connect directly to

Linedancer...

Thank you Jeff for the advice, I usually use internet cafes etc, but you
never know how secure they are, it would be nice to have my own laptop with
me, now I know how to do it.

Aries...

when I have no other means of accessing the internet I use libraries or
internet cafés but when I finished I always clear the history via Internet
Options - don't know if that makes where I've been safe from would be
prying eyes or not, but it's better than nothing I guess :)

Linedancer...

I usually do that Val and try and clear the cookies if I can.
When we were in Tenerife, the computers were in German, I changed the
settings and did a restart, but couldn't get back in without a password,
they never seemed to work much after that LOL
The weirdest thing was finding how to get the @ key, it's usually Alt Gr and
the @ key, but these computers had to be I think it was Ctrl Z & Q, also the
y printed as Z and the Z printed as Y I gave up in the end LOL

the Internet.

there.