Stealth ICS

Hello, all! I know, I know, it's been a long (looonggg) time since I've been around. Life is insanely different. College = whoa (in a 90% good way, haha). I'm going to the UofM, with an extremely tentative major in Physics. I think I'm going to switch to either Sound Engineering or some veterinary science. We'll see

I do, however, have a tech question!

I have my desktop (XP Pro) as well as my laptop (MacBook Pro). I've managed to get XP to share my wired connection wirelessly with my laptop, but there's 2 problems.

The first is strength. Using the Advanced settings in the card's Device Manager profile I can reduce broadcast strength to 25% - can I go lower?

The second is that I really want it to not broadcast the SSID. I need this connection for only my laptop, so that I can get wireless in my room. It will be encrypted, but I'm more worried about it showing up randomly on other computers. I'm pretty sure they won't walk around with a Linux laptop trying to sniff out a wireless network they couldn't detect in the first place.

Any suggestions? Is there a program that can do this better than XP's ICS?

Thank you all!