Hotspot Shield recently has gained a lot of popularity because of it’s free VPN service which gives us an US IP address when we’re connected. There are a lot of reasons why we need an US IP address, such as playing an online game Mabinogi which requires US IP address, watching videos from Hulu, Pandora, Veoh, and even staying private and secure!

Hotspot Shield used to have a 10GB limit usage per month, then has reduced to 5GB and now only 3GB! However yesterday I used up to about 1.8GB and at night I couldn’t connect anymore. I woke up today morning and still couldn’t connect. The problem I had with Hotspot Shield was it kept on looping the following process Starting VPN Process > Unknown > Waiting for server > Authenticating > Pulling Options and couldn’t get connected. Finally it stopped and says TCP connect wait. I manually disconnected, then reconnect and now it says “Daemon Start Error”.

Fix Hotspot Shield Pulliong Options

Thank God I managed to fix this problem myself and continue using Hotspot Shield without getting any help from Hotspot Shield or AnchorFree people.

Previous version of Hotspot Shield 1.03 able to give the message “bandwidth exceeded” but don’t know why the latest 1.04 doesn’t. At AnchorFree’s website, it did say “Additional bandwidth may be purchased thereafter”, but there is no way for me to purchase additional bandwidth if I’ve overused it.

I read that some people suggested to disable the network connection, then connect HSS and while HSS is trying to connect, re-enable the network connection. I tried but it didn’t work. I even tried removing the whole network adapter and reinstalling it but still didn’t work. Uninstalling and reinstalling Hotspot Shield didn’t work either.

Then I remembered that our network adapter card has a MAC address. A MAC address, short for Media Access Control address, is a unique code assigned to most forms of networking hardware. The address is PERMANENTLY assigned to the hardware, so your network card should have a MAC address. Since Hotspot Shield has a way to know how much bandwidth we’ve used, that means they surely has a way to know which computer has used up much how bandwidth. My guess is, the network adapter’s MAC address.

Last year I written an article about the importance of spoofing your MAC address. I tried spoofing my Mac address with BMAC but it still shows the same MAC address in ipconfig /all command. Perhaps that software is a little outdated or somehow it didn’t work on my computer. I then tried using Mac MakeUp and it manage to change my network adapter’s MAC address. It is very easy to use. Just select the network adapter that you want to change, click generate random button, select completely random MAC, and click Change.

Change Mac Address for Hotspot Shield

After I’ve done that, I ran Hotspot Shield and tried to connect. Voila! Hotspot Shield now says “Connected“! What a great way to start off my day…
Hotspot Shield Connected

[ Download Mac MakeUp ]

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