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Microsoft Virtual Wireless Wifi Miniport Adapter



The Microsoft virtual WiFi miniport adapter has been around since Windows 7 and features on laptops and mobile devices with WiFi cards. It is a virtual adapter that allows Windows to split a network in two, either to act as a wireless bridge or WiFi hotspot. These are useful if you need to extend a wireless connection or provide WiFi for other devices but does come with a performance overhead.


For example, if you connect your laptop to your only Ethernet port, you can make your laptop a wireless hotspot for other devices to connect to in order to gain internet access. As a network card can only connect to a single network at a time, Microsoft introduced the Microsoft virtual WiFi miniport adapter to overcome that limitation.




Microsoft Virtual Wireless Wifi Miniport Adapter



Leaving Microsoft virtual WiFi miniport adapter enabled can slow down your primary wireless connection. It likely comes with a small performance and battery overhead too but these will likely be very small.


Unless you use your computer as a WiFi hotspot or as a bridge for other devices, you do not need the Microsoft virtual WiFi miniport adapter. It is a great idea by Microsoft but is only useful in certain situations. As there is a network overhead involved with having the adapter running, you may receive a marginal network performance gain from disabling it.


Basically, Virtual WiFi is a technology that virtualizes your network adapter much in the same way VMWare virtualizes your entire operating system. Once virtualized, you can basically convert one physical wireless adapter into two virtual ones. This allows you to then connect one virtual network adapter to your regular wireless network and use the other virtual adapter to connect to another network such as an ad-hoc network or to create a WiFi hotspot and allow others to connect to your Windows 7 machine wirelessly like they would connect to a normal wireless access point.


In the drop-down under Home networking connection, make sure to pick the name of the virtual WiFi mini port adapter. It may be something like Wireless Network Connection 2 or 3, etc. Now to setup the wireless access point on the virtual network adapter, open the command prompt (Start, type cmd) and type in the following command:


In the line above, you need to change VirtualNetworkName to the desired name of your wireless network and change Password to whatever password you want on the network. Note that all virtual wireless access points have to use WPA2-PSK (AES) encryption no matter what. Once it has been setup, you can enable it by typing in the following line:


This virtual adapter was installed by my Intel Wireless driver software. I was unable to disconnect my main Network Interface Card driver from this virtual adapter software. So I just disabled the virtual adapter from the network connections window.


Windows 7 brought an entirely new realm of features and functionalities to the world of Windows, and one of the least known yet highly useful features that were introduced with Windows 7 is the Microsoft Virtual WiFi Mini Port Adapter. The Virtual WiFi Adapter is designed to basically virtualize the physical network adapter that every computer has. This means that, using the Microsoft Virtual WiFi Mini Port Adapter, you can turn the physical network adapter that their computer has into two virtual network adapters.


One of the two virtual network adapters can then be used to connect to the regular wireless network, whereas the other can be used to connect to another network such as an ad-hoc or turned into a WiFi Hotspot that users of other networks can connect to. Most people do not know exactly how they can turn a virtual network adapter into a Wireless Access Point so that their computer can be used as a WiFi Hotspot. Well, there are two methods that you can use to easily turn the Microsoft Virtual WiFi Mini Port Adapter into a Wireless Access Point for others two connect to.


A Microsoft virtual WiFi Miniport adapter allows you to create a brand new virtual network. This is especially useful when you have to extend your wireless connection. When you extend the connection, you can provide WiFi to other devices and using your own laptop as the host.


I finally found out how to uninstall the microsoft wifi miniport adapter its so easy all you do is go to the command prompt as a admin and type this "netsh wlan stop hostednetwork" with no quotes. than type this "netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=disallow" also no quotes. at first i thought this was disabling it same as right clicking and disable but actually it disables the service and the microsoft wifi miniport is gone. for some reason its mode gets set to allow instated of disallow and when you uninstall it it reappears and messes up the networking, example, printers,wifi routers,etc.


i've created a hosted network; ssid="NAME"; key=******; authentication= WPA2-Personal; Radio type= 802.11g etc.. but this is the not one that i needed... i want to delete it .. please provide the command for it.this networks conflicts with the Dell WLAN adpater,so i've to delete it , instade deleting/disableing the microsoft wifi miniport adapter. thanking you.


I don't know if this seems too obvious a fix to have actually worked, but I simply went into Device Manager and disabled the virtual miniport adapter. I was often getting dropped off my wifi for no apparent reason, so did some poking around and found the MS device along with my Broadcom wifi adapter. Simply disabled the MS device and I haven't had an issue so far, and no dropped wifi.


Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport Adapter is the latest addition to the Windows operating system which virtualizes the physical network adapter in the same way as VMWare virtualizes the entire OS. On a virtual network, an adapter can connect to the regular wireless networks and another virtual network adapter can connect to another network such as an ad-hoc network. It can also be used to create a Wi-Fi hotspot and allow other devices to connect to the Windows machines wirelessly like they are connecting to the normal wireless access points. Microsoft has added this new feature of a virtual Wi-Fi Miniport adapter to Windows 7 and to later versions of the Windows OS that is Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10.


The Microsoft Virtual Wifi Miniport adapter feature is new and comes disabled by default. So, before using it, you need to enable it, and then only you can create your own wireless access point. You can create a wireless access point using two methods.


By using the Microsoft Virtual Wi-Fi Miniport adapter, all the Windows users can share their internet/network with others wirelessly. Sometimes, the driver may get corrupted and you may find problems while creating the Wi-Fi hotspot service from your PC. To troubleshoot this problem, you will have to reinstall the driver software on your PC by following these steps.


On Windows 7 and on Windows Server 2008 R2 with the Wireless LAN Service installed, the operating system installs a virtual device if a Hosted Network capable wireless adapter is present on the machine. This virtual device normally shows up in the "Network Connections Folder" as "Wireless Network Connection 2" with a Device Name of "Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport adapter" if the computer has a single wireless network adapter. This virtual device is used exclusively for performing software access point (SoftAP) connections. The lifetime of this virtual device is tied to the physical wireless adapter. If the physical wireless adapter is disabled, this virtual device will be removed as well. 2ff7e9595c


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