I’m at a vacation resort I’ve been to in the past, along with my girlfriend. The guest network is abysmally slow and ~3 years ago on our first visit, the maintenance tech who came by took pity on us and signed us both in to the staff network.
My companion’s laptop is an XP machine; I’m on a different laptop than the one I had back then and I don’t have the staff network’s password stored so I’m stuck for the time being with the guest network. She, on the other hand, is logged in to the staff network automatically because XP still has that password memorized.
Eventually, maintenance is supposed to drop by and help me out, but if I knew where to look on her XP box, could I perhaps read the password in plain text and therefore know what to enter on my own machine?
On a Mac it would be the “Keychain”. Does XP have an equivalent password-storage utility program or other human-readable mechanism? If so, where does it hide and how do I use it?
IIRC Windows XP didn’t have native/built-in WiFi support, so it’s likely to be handled by the WiFi chipset manufacturer’s driver and/or support application.
The WPA key (that’s what the dialog is asking for on my own computer, a WPA-2 key) appears to be represented as a 32-character alphanumeric string enclosed in curly brackets and into which dashes are interspersed. I tried entering that same string as 2 chars (no dashes) and then when that didn’t work as displayed on XP, with the dashes (haven’t tried including the curly braces). No joy yet.
I have the 32-character string. I don’t see WTF to paste it or type it in in order to click some kind of non-obvious button or invoke some non-obvious menu item that would provide me with the characters I’m supposed to input as the password to join the ^@!#@!! network.
