help needed : wifi long distance

[Byront07]

okay so here is my predicament, i am currently a student at a graphic design college and do quite a lot of work on my tablet in class, note taking, tutorials etc.
My tablet only has a 32gb hdd and with windows 7 it doesnt leave me much space for anything at all.

My flat that i stay in is about 400m (straight line) from the college. I have quite a decent pc there with a good cpu and a large amount of hard drive space but my issue is its a desktop and i cant bring it to class everyday.

I have a netgear wireless router that i am not using and a wug kit that i never ended up setting up when i moved to pretoria. If posible i would love to connect to my pc from college and remote into it or even just be able to use the hard drives as network drives.

what at all can i do to acheive this? I am aware that the router range wont be enough, and the wug kit runs on a different wireless frequency to my tablet (or so ive heard, my knowledge is limited) do i require another wug kit to be installed at the college or can i make the wug kit run on 2.4ghz?

I really am stuck and am willing to spend some money (not thousands but enough for a wireless deivice if needed) to get it working.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

 

[Viva]

Wouldn't it be easier to just upgrade the tablet's HDD to something bigger? I assume it's a SSD, in which case a new bigger SSD won't be cheap, but compared to the trouble, money of setting up a WUG kit at your college, it might be the better option.

 

[rajharie]

Use an internet connection on your device and store your docs etc in the cloud. That way you are not restricted to only accessing your info at your school but your info is available anywhere.
Options to look at:
Dropbox:2Gb is free but you can get upto 8Gb for free based on friends signing up. You can also buy extra storage.
Evernote: no limit on storage only on data transfer but again you can buy capacity
Amazon Cloud Drive: 5 Gb free and you can buy more
Google Docs: 1 Gb free for non-Google Docs format storage but you can again buy more.
Microsoft Office: 25Gb hard capped - not very user friendly.
Box.net
iCloud: 5Gb when it comes out.

Personally would recommend Evernote for what you need. Cool tools like you can take a picture of a white board and it will OCR it and make it searchable. Great for when you are a student. You can take pics of your screen and graphics and store online.
You will need an internet connection to get to all of this but I think with Evernote you can take the notes and it will sync when you have a web connection (not sure as I have not used it without an internet connection)

Other option is to involve your school's IT Dept and get them to put in WUG type kit and link it to the network. It would make a more compelling case if you had many classmates living in the same block of flats but then the IT Dept would have to be comfortable opening access to the network from your house. Maybe easier to use your school's wifi connection to connect to the web. Failing which a 3G connection is your next bet. Get your hands on a MiFi device and you will have your own 3G shareable wifi hotspot.

 

[stricken]

Base Station:

Check if your WUG kit has dual band WiFi card. (it probably does) (Check in winbox if you can set the card to 3.2Ghz). Mount the antenna facing your college and all the other doodads and hook up your PC.


Satellite:
Get a can of pringles. (Pref the Fusion flavour ; ) )
Eat the contents, keep the can.
Screw the antenna off the netgear.
Make a small hole the diameter of the antenna in the bottom of the pringles can (exact middle).
get some prestik / glue
Fix the antenna straight into the pringles can.
Somehow screw it back on to the netgear, and use lots of ductape or something else imaginative to keep things together.
Now you have a router gun looking thing.

Testing :
Go to college. Plug in netgear. Make sure its WiFi is set to MAX tx strength. And point the router gun at your base station antenna.
Now heres a little problem since the netgear probably cannot be placed in repeater mode, you will need to go back home and firstly see if you can see the netgears SSID in winbox, and then connect to it if you can. Once connected, you can set up routing, etc.
Go back to college. connect tablet via WiFi to netgear (you may have to sit close as the foil lining in the pringles can leaks almost nothing and shoots that signal straight out the front), and configure its gateway as the IP of your base station.

And voila.

oh yes.. dont forget to take the lid OFF the pringles can when you do this. : )

edit: if you want to get snazzy, you can set the Mikrotik router to auto connect whenever it sees the SSID of the netgear. Thus when you go to college you just have to point it until its web gui shows you it (the wireless client that is your wug kit) is connected.

 

[bubbatentoe]

Cantenna!!!
Another man with (fusion flavored) class.