How to improve the range of my laptop WiFi?

Hello, I am currently stuck subleasing an apartment for a couple months until I move into my new apartment, where I will have a normal wifi network.

As of now, I'm using my college's wifi network, since the apartment is right across the street from one of our school's buildings. However, I only get 1-2 bars on my laptop, and rarely am able to have consistent access to the school wifi. Is there something I can get for my laptop that will improve the reception of the wifi signal? Keep in mind I don't have access to the physical router as its in my school. Thanks for any help!

get a Linksys WRT54g or similar router. put DD-WRT on it. use it as a bridge now. use it as a wireless router when you get another place

1. I had to google DD-WRT to find out what that even means; I have no idea how to put it on.

2. what does "use it as a bridge" even really mean? How would I do that? I'm a complete noob, bear with me here. Thanks for trying.

DD-WRT is a firmware you can use with Linksys routers, and I would agree that its superior to the factory Linksys firmware. To install, you would simply download DD-WRT and do a router firmware update and select the DD-WRT file you downloaded.

As for bridging, when you set a wireless router to bridged mode, it basically disables the routing functions while leaving the wireless enabled etc. Oversimplified answer, but you get the point. :-)

Ubiquity $49 Loco with its built in antenna. Connect it to the wired network LAN port of your laptop.

1. Tmote sky also one of the highly used wireless sensor devices in the current market. This sensor device is specially designed for large organization to meet the requirement of the production capacity of the company.

2. This device is used by the large organizations as it has the high capacity of data transfer with low power consumption facility. It is considered as one of the highly reliable device for the organization.

3. This device has also designed with a feature of hardware link layer encryption and authentication. All the data is collected through USB port from the system.