PC World has a good article out on 12 Downloads to Make Your Wi-Fi Life Easier, including a video on setting up a Wi-Fi network. It’s a good collection of downloads, most of them free. A few of their picks are applications I’ve used for a while, and then I have a couple of personal favorites that aren’t on their list. In this post, I’ll point out what you can get out of a few of these free apps.
One free tool that PC World doesn’t have on its list is QCheck, from Ixia, which I have found to be the very best free way to guage my home Wi-Fi network’s performance. It tests throughput, streaming, response times, and more.
Hotspot Shield is one of PC World’s choices for users of public Wi-Fi hotspots. I hadn’t tried this before, but it’s basically a free and very easy way to get the same encrypted protection you get from more advanced Virtual Private Network (VPN) applications, such as OpenVPN.
Xirrus Wi-Fi Monitor is one of PC World’s picks that I have used, and highly recommend. While QCheck is a more robust tool for really thorough performance checks for your Wi-Fi network, Wi-Fi Monitor is great for on-the-fly checkups. It appears as a gadget for Windows Vista users, and displays your signal strength, your IP address, and more.
JiWire makes PC World’s list and I’ve written about it before here. This is just a very easy way to sniff out available Wi-Fi networks wherever you are and display information about the networks.
While it’s not on PC World’s list, I’m a big fan of Devicescape. You can select a number of different kinds of devices at this site, ranging from Nokia Internet Tablets to Mac OS X systems, and get useful utilities for establishing a Wi-Fi connection very quickly.
In addition to these, I recommend checking out PC World’s other (mostly) free Wi-Fi enhancement utilities.
Do you have any favorite Wi-Fi applications?
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