It promises to turn your WiFi capable
notebook/laptop into a WiFi hotspot for internet sharing.
On the download page, it was quite easy
get the app. It offers a lite version meaning it is free.
System requirements also is not a
problem. It did install on my notebook that is eight years old with
1.5 Ghz Intel Celeron processor and 256mb DDR RAM. It does however
need a .net framework.
After installation of the lite version,
it immediately asks to upgrade to Pro explaining that with PRO you
can share your internet connection. At reading this, I got
disappointed because I thought internet sharing should have been
basic with this service and not only available to its paid version.
At any rate I continued to proceed
using it after declining the upgrade offer with the intention of
trying it out to see if it does work.
After connectify has started and is
broadcasting, I tried to check if the network is present. In my Nokia
phone running on Symbian OS the connectify hotspot is present and it
can easily connect to it.
Now to check if my Android tablet can
find it, which is the main reason I installed connectify. Going to
settings, I turned on WiFi but the connectify network can not be
found. Several scans still does not show it. Even trying to manually
add the network onmy Android tablet did not yield results.
In retrospect, connectify is similar to
adding an ad hoc network (which we already know is easy to set-up
refer to Share your laptop's internet connection) using a fancy user interface but is useless to Android
devices.
But wait, that is not all. This
application is very stubborn. It launches itself automatically at
start-up but it don't want to close. Try closing it by right clicking
its icon on the task bar and click exit. The connectify icon
disappears but then it will reappear if not immediately, just after a
brief period. Even using task manager is not able to close it. There
are two processes associated with connectify found at the task manager but closing any of them
causes itself to get relaunched instantanuously. If I did not know it
to be connectify, I would have thought that it was a virus. The only
way to permanently close it is by uninstalling the application.
My verdict
Connectify seems to recycle an idea,
which in this case is setting up an ad hoc network, that is fairly
easy to perform. Well, to connectify's credit, it does make it even
easier to set-up an ad hoc network with a nice user interface at
that.
However, with the way this application
is behaving, I am a bit concerned for my security. Not that it
contains malicious codes in it, I believe it to be clean. But still,
call me paranoid, I can't help to be concerned if there is a
program on my machine that I can not control. Aside from this, it just a waste of memory resources when not in use but is still running as it can not be stopped.
To me connectify failed for my purpose.
Back to CyberLiving home page
Other Posts
Becareful of using site:http://www.yoursite.com to tell if your site was indexed
Windows XP not updating
0 comments
Post a Comment