And somehow I'm going to have to try to live with your displeasure over my contradicting your false claims.
You'll just have to go on... live day by day...
All it does is transform the computer into an access point- with severe limitations.
I might also point out that you can do this same thing with XP, Vista... and, if the manufacturers network adapter software doesn't suck, windows 2000.
unlike a router, however, a wireless card set to ad hoc mode does not establish a relationship as a router does- a router essentially maintains "control" of the network- an ad hoc network between devices has no master device, they all communicate in a large happy peer 2 peer network. Ideally, the goal is that communicating with device B from Device A means going through whatever devices are between the two in order to get the signal across.
By themselves, for example, Device A and Device B may be, say, 100 feet apart, but they have very week transceivers (or some other equally contrived issue) that means they cannot establish a connection. By communicating through other devices, they can communicate using full signals.
Of course, this is only the ideal situation. the reality is that manufacturers don't always create 100% compatible network cards and they all have their own definition of what the best way to go about the network communication is. So as you add devices you essentially just end up creating a shouting match between the wireless devices, where each device is trying to impose it's will on the others.
As you can see in this beautiful diagram I made in flash:
Note that the router connects wirelessly to ChucksPC, ILOVEROCKYROAD, and moarspeed.
moarspeed has a second network card, and has a ad hoc network with burlapsack,I_IZ_IN_DE_HALL, and thomas the printer (which is a printer, if you are just joining us).
Now- moarspeed can easily bridge the two networks- but, because of the nature of the ad hoc network, none of the other devices care- or even know- about it. I_IZ_IN_DE_HALL doesn't know that it needs to connect to moarspeed to access the internet. Basically it just broadcasts the request and eventually moarspeed bridges the connection and sends that request to the router, the router fetches it, and then moarspeed broadcasts the results back over it's little p2p network. I_IZ_IN_DE_HALL picks up on this and accepts the data.
and this is of course assuming all the devices are getting along. Perhaps Thomas the printer accidentally adds an extra CR character after every LF whenever it rebroadcasts a message. maybe it doesn't even re-broadcast at all, meaning it's a dead leaf. Whatever happens, these devices are not part of the network established by the router, nor does their method of communicating with one another look anything like the router-clients map that would be most useful when you have a single device offering access to a wider area network- that device is considered to be "in charge" and takes care of communications between each device. in this case, all the computers in that network are considered peers, they share and exchange information as they wish.
unlike the router's network, where ILOVEROCKYROAD would need to communicate with ChucksPC by sending the data to the router, the devices are free to communicate with whatever they please. printing to a network printer attached to a router, means communicating with the router. But, in the ad hoc network, they just communicate as they please.
Of course, in the ideal world where network protocols are agreed on by all devices and thomas the printer doesn't have a secret plot to strip out all linefeed characters before it passes along the information (or any other number of unintended quirks), then yes. It would increase the network range, Once you bridged the connections. I believe that is now handled automatically now in 7. Otherwise the ad hoc network and the router are completely segregated.
