A friend of mine wanted to play a network game with me. He wanted to know whether there is any way he could connect to my laptop using his laptop's wifi or bluetooth and be able to play these games.

Is this possible at all? and how can it be done, if it realy is possible.

Another thing is that we dont want to go into buying stuffs like wireless router and stuffs like taht. Just wanna know whether we could do a Peer2Peer connection and be able to play our game in a network? Can the bluetooth's Personal Area Network do this?

I know it is possible to do this with WiFi, as I have done it before between my laptop and two of my friends'. One of you needs to create what is known as an ad-hoc network. You give it a name and encryption (if you want) and then others can join it is just the same way they would join any other network.

If you're using Windows XP, Microsoft have written a guide to getting ad-hoc networking up and running. On a Mac you just need to click the little wireless icon and choose to create a new network. And finally, if you're using Ubuntu, theres a guide on the documentation section of the website.

Now isnt this lovely? This is exactly wht I am looking for. I know that the Bluetooth data transfer might be way too slow for the required bandwidth for the gaming network. Thanks rvalkass for the info.

I would go through the tutorial from Microsoft. I am using Windows Vista Ultimate and I hope its gonna work in there.

thanks again man.

That one was a good link.

I'm one of those tech support guy from a networking company.

The backbone for ad-hoc networking will be the SSID and Channel settings. (Which you will have to manually configure on both computers.)

Then the IP Address.

I'm pretty sure you can do it. Again, that's a good link.

Thanks for that link rvalkass
I was searching on the net for this kind of stuff.I would go through the tutorial.
I think tis would help me and I would be then able to play games with my friend.
But what the speed you got when you connected the computers through WI-FI and Bluetooth

This post has been edited by musicmaza: Dec 25 2007, 08:47 PM

Bluetooth has a rough maximum of 2.1 Mbit/s (0.26 Mbyte/s). The Wi-Fi varies depending on what sort of protocol each computer supports. 802.11b has a typical transfer rate of 4.5 Mbit/s (0.56 Mbyte/s) while 802.11g has a typical speed of 19 Mbit/s (2.38 Mbyte/s). The draft 802.11n specifications support speeds of up to an average of 74 Mbit/s (9.25 Mbyte/s). You'll be limited by who has the slowest hardware.

Assalam-o-Alaikum!
(Peace be upon You)

Hey thats very valuable information. Now a days I am using Ubuntu 7.10. I plugged my Bluetooth USB Device to the USB port, a bluetooth notification appeared in the system tray. I bonded my Nokia N70 with my PC via bluetooth successfully but can't exchange files. Any help?

Just to inform that Bluetooth technology has much wider applications than Wi-Fi. Apart from normal File Transfers, Bluetooth technology supports wireless networks in a group of 8 machines/devices, Synching etc. There are various services built on top of Bluetooth Technology. Whether its Bluetooth headset, File Transfer, Wireless Network, Synching or any other service, Bluetooth can support them.

These services are better known as Bluetooth Profiles.

I didn't think that Bluetooth supported peer-to-peer connections as far as computers linking up together onto a "network."

Isn't Bluetooth really just a device-to-device, limited to functions provided by the profiles that imbibe mentioned? I don't think that Bluetooth can support an actual network like WiFi 802.11a/b/g/n can... especially with a hypothetical maximum of 2.1MB/s. (It's just not practical...)