Small program that connects to my Wi-Fi network

Question

I'm trying to find a program that I can set up my WiFi connection in, and then anytime I run that file it connects to that same WiFi network.

The reason I need this is because I work with hundreds of computers daily and I wish to test the network cards. All of the computers I test are on their OOBE screen, meaning the very first screen you get when you get a new computer, and I want to make sure they are all working as they should. Normally I just click through and connect to WiFi through the setup screen, but this doesn't work for older units like windows 8 or 7 as the wifi connection stage is much later.

I've experimented with batch scripts and things but they seem slow and they don't work half the time due to limitations.

My basic need is this:
A lightweight program that can be ran via command prompt that is supported by Windows 7, 8 and 10. The program should only require a "one-time" setup, so that I don't have to type out the network information for every single computer. Running the EXE should automatically connect to the wifi once the "one-time" setup is complete.

This must be a solution inside of windows, as I need to run commands from the command prompt that require an internet connection afterwards.

Answer 1

If you only wish to test the network cards are working OK I would suggest a bootable Live Linux image, pre-loaded with the network card drivers that you require. You could then have a bash or python script that runs on start-up to examine, test and list with results the network cards found. Possibly saving the results and some information on the PC tested to persistent storage.

You could then boot from USB and auto-test the network cards very quickly. I would suggest taking a look at the python psutil library as a possible mechanism for gathering the data there is also pyspeedtest which may be useful.

For selecting your distribution to use DistroWatch is a good starting point and I would look for one of the light but hardware compatible distributions such as Finnix, Puppy, Lubuntu or Mint.

USB Creation can be handled with tools such as Universal USB Installer, Unetbootin or LiLi - a lot of help can be found at Pen Drive Linux amongst other sources.