Question : How do I put a laptop on wireless internet?

I was at someones house last night and installed a wireless pci card in two machines then sharred the BT Broadband connection to the internet on the main pc and then the second computer connected to the same connection through its wireless card and everything was fine.

Now I am looking at buying a cheap laptop for £399 (brand new) in the UK this is a very very good price and we dont really want to pay more at the moment! Now, can I buy a USB wireless adapter and add this to the same shared network connection?

It pretty urgent that I get an answer for the above.  But I also need to know how to connect the laptop to the internet as there has been a lot of advertisements about connecting wireless to vodaphone while travelling on the road.  How does this work? someone just suggested it connects via a cable that is attached to your mobile phone (i assume this phone needs to be blue tooth?

thank you

Mat

I may need to split points on this question, so all feedback will be greatly appreciated!

Answer : How do I put a laptop on wireless internet?

I agree with Sunray. Try and get a PCMCIA wireless card as it is mucu more portable than getting a USB adapter and shouldn't have much difference in price.

In regards to your mobile wireless there are better options than snerkel recommend. I've set up a handful and these include getting a PCMCIA card for your laptop (provided by Vodafone but not usually cheap - as it will be specific to their network). Ultimately these PCMCIA cards are wireless modems and they are being offered at various data rates ranging from 19000 baud (like a slow dialup modem) to broadband speeds (probably only available in certain areas).

In any case these companies typically offer a variety of plans. Some plans piggy back off your existing mobile service with them and you just pay an additional low flat rate monthly fee for the service and share mobile minutes with your phone and other plans include a much greater flat rate fee that offer unlimited log on time and don't take from your existing mobile phone minutes.

Also recently some of these PCMCIA wireless modem/wireless broadband cards I have been seeing for laptops and now also doubling up for as wireless LAN cards you can use on any 802.11a/b/g network. So you could possible kill two birds with one stone here and get a card from Vodafone that can do both 802.11/a/b/g wireless lan and wireless wan modem for the road.