Bootcamp: Airport on Windows with Parallels
Published on July 20, 2008
Switched back to MacBook Pro after few unhappy weeks of MacBook Air, I’ve decided to try again Parallels.
Last time I’ve used it, almost 2 years ago, it was a beta and had too many limitations for my needs. Two years later, I must admit that it simply works and suits perfectly my needs, even with “only” 2GB of ram.
I use it with the Windows XP partition generated with Boot Camp and the only problem I had, was with the airport connection. On Windows in Parallels, airport is not recognized as an installed device, so if you want to surf the web from windows with a wifi connection, the only solution is to share the wireless connection between the guest and the host OS.
In most cases, it works automatically, but not in mine. After hours of managing setting trying every combination of shared network, host only network, default adapter and so one, the best results I had gained was the possibility of browsing google.com (it wasn’t cached, it worked!) and few other sites. I could ping correctly everything, but couldn’t open any web page.
Googling and googling, I have found the solution I want to share on this post. I’ve downloaded a small app called Dr. TCP, and in the very last row of the window I have selected “Parallels network adapter” and set MTU to 1400. Now everything works like a charm.
Hope it helps somebody else – I’ve seen many other users looking for help in many forums, with both Windows XP and Windows Vista, and even with Linux. Credit to this velayo’s post on Insanely Mac Forum. I can just add that reboot is probably not needed on newer Windows version.