Saw a link on hexus which resulted in me signing up for a wireless data card for my laptop. Great for use while travelling like I am now. It’s finally hit the value point to make it worthwhile getting, 2GB a month for £20, data card cost depends on contract duration (I went for 18 months and got the card for £50). Speeds are ok, am maxing out around 50kbit over GPRS and 400kbit over 3G. Pings are in the magnitude of 1000 ms and 400 ms respectively so maybe online gaming is out…
It’s not a fully transparent connection as far as I can see. They seem to recompress web graphics I guess to save bandwidth. So things look a bit poor at times. There also seems to be an “18+ filter” which is on by default, and it prompts you the option of unlocking it by making a debit and credit to a credit card as a check. No, I wasn’t surfing for pron, it was the MS page that came up on MSN messenger that got blocked 
And on closer inspection, I probably shouldn’t be running it anyway, as their web page states that VoIP and “messaging over IP” are forbidden and may result in being kicked if caught. I assume they put this clause in to deter people from avoiding the normal extortionate mobile rates. I think I need to read the small print, when I just noticed I never received…
Well to sidestep the above issues, I’m thinking of setting up VPN, but how?.. Need a simple-ish to set up solution. Lappy runs XP home, the home network end will have a box running 2k. It is behind a static IP and NAT router, port forwarding is no problem. I’d like it so that, once the VPN connection is up, all traffic will go over the VPN link. Ideally encrypted. Doesn’t have to be absolutely uncrackable, but just enough so that it isn’t gonna be broken in hours like WEP is.
What sort of CPU hit is involved with encryption, if we assume 512kbps of traffic?
Have done some googling around, rediscovered Hamachi, any comments or other suggestions?