What I need:
A way to export the wireless networks from a user's XP SP2 machine and import them on a new XP SP2 machine.
Why:
We have many users that use wireless networks at home but are unable to remember what their network keys and settings are. We are replacing 700 laptops by the end of this year and are running into this problem more frequently, any help would be appreciated.
Netsh WLAN commands, will not work because this is a XP machine and not Vista
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This tool reads wireless settings from this registry location :
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWAR
It would look to simple to export this as a reg file and restore this on the new machine but you may want to try (I don't have any machine to try this on at the moment, maybe tomorrow...)
It worked! I'm gonna document the piece I figured out for others that may need to do this.
Using that utility it gives us something like:
Network Name (SSID): MyHome
Key Type : WPA-PSK
Key (Hex) : 834639a88129627ef5653e4ac3
Key (Ascii) :
WEP connections give you the passphrase in ASCII format as well, WPA only shows the Hex version.
With WPA,
1 - copy the Hex key
2 - Run 'Start' - 'Control Panel' - 'Wireless Network Setup Wizard'
3 - Select the 'Setup a new wireless network'
4 - Select 'Manually assign a network key'
5 - Check 'Use WPA encryption instead of WEP ...'
6 - Paste the HEX (64 characters) key into the fields
Then you are all set and don't need the passphrase.
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by: VorenusPosted on 2007-10-15 at 16:23:48ID: 20082187
If they are using WEP-based encryption, you can use this :
http://www.nirsoft.net/uti
This tool is scriptable as well which is a good thing if you are doing this for more than 700 laptops.
Unfortunately, I am not sure how to re-use the keys it gives for WPA, but it works fine for WEP...
Cheers,