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May 21, 2026 Categories Reading time: 3 minutes I enjoy playing around with old computers and software from the 90s and early 2000s. My childhood computer was the Amiga 500 which I still have and which I love dearly, but the Windows 9x/XP era of computing is the most nostalgic for me because this coincides with my teenage years and my early 20s, and there are just so many great things about it; 3dfx games, the early internet, Napster, ICQ, Winamp... it was a fascinating time in tech.
One problem with computers from this time period is how to get them online. They either have no wifi or severely outdated wifi modules which at best do WEP encryption, but they can't connect to a modern WPA encrypted wifi network. So in order to get them online you would either have to downgrade the security of your wifi network (terrible idea), set up a dedicated wifi network for these machines with only WEP security enabled (also terrible) or connect them via ethernet, which is easy enough as long as you have an Ethernet connection available. But what if you want to get an old Windows 9x/XP-era computer online somewhere where there is no ethernet connection? Here's a deceptively simple way to do it:
Get a cheap USB-C to Ethernet adapter from Ebay/Amazon Connect this to your (Android) 1 phone and via a short Ethernet cable to the Ethernet port of the computer in question Enable "Ethernet Tethering" in the phone's settings
And that's it. As long as you have automatic network configuration via DHCP enabled on the PC, the phone should automatically assign an IP address to the PC and bridge its wifi connection to the wired network through the Ethernet adapter. And this should work with every old (and new) computer, as long it has an Ethernet port. I admit, it's not the prettiest of solutions (I need to get a shorter Ethernet cable), but it works and it's really simple to set up. So why did it take me so long to figure this out?
I have no idea.
I tested this with a USB-C docking station which has an Ethernet port too, and it worked just as well, but required external power to the docking station, meaning an extra power cable is required.
1I don't have an iPhone, so I have no idea if it would work with iOS, too.
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