Using your PC as a Wireless AP and how to modify IP configuration

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Over the holidays I got into a sticky situation where I needed to use my Laptop as an access point to share a network connection. But it doesn’t give you much of a chance to change IP settings so if you have some other device that uses an overlapping IP range you might need to change some settings, thankfully there’s a KB on How to Change the IP Range for the Internet Connection Sharing DHCP. service.  It involves editing the registry so don’t forget to backup the registry first.

To change the IP address that is assigned to the host and the IP address range that is used by the DHCP service on the Connection Sharing host, use Registry Editor to change the following values. These values are located in the following folder:

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\services\SharedAccess\Parameters

  • (REG_SZ) ScopeAddress
  • (REG_SZ) StandaloneDhcpAddress

The ScopeAddress value is set to the address range that you want to use with Connection Sharing. The StandaloneDhcpAddress value is the address range that is used when Virtual Wi-Fi/SoftAP is enabled. For both values, a network mask of 255.255.255.0 is used and is not configurable.