wireless router doohickey what am i looking for?

[233]

going out in an hour or so to get a wireless router(my first one)

now its for a cable/dsl connection and will be used for a hard wire connection for my main rig and wifi for the wii and 2 laptops

what should i be looking at?

what features do i want?

anything special i need to know?

 

[stevenazari1]

things to know:

-software/firmware-
data encryption/security
application sharing/port forwarding
built in firewall options

-hardware-
max range
max speed
max/types of connections

at present the fastest speed you can get is 24mb so dont go blowing money on a 300mb wireless router. Also try sticking to the more popular routers, cheap ones like safecom and the like tend to get bad feedback. more so if you try upgrading the firmware.

 

[tolien]

at present the fastest speed you can get is 24mb

20Mbps on cable.

Faster wireless will mean faster file transfers within the network, and most quoted wireless speeds translate to around half that in the real world.
Whether it's worth bothering with a lot of the routers claiming to do >54Mbps will depend on the devices you're going to connect to it - what wireless adapters do the two laptops have, for example.

There's also constantly a stream of "recommend a cable router" threads in this forum - there's a whole load of recommendations if you search.

 

[233]

cheers tolien i'll havea looky,


ideally want something cheap/cheerfull and will work well with a hardwired port for my main rig and wifi for the wii and 2 lappys

 

[Snapshot]

Just make sure you don't buy anything from Belkin.

 

[233]

woot got a netgear wpn824 for 50 quid from the purple shirts

setup no problem works brilliant and the range is fantastic(works 3 houses down with a good signal strength,

built a small network of 4 systems so far trouble free

just need to get the wii to accept the security settings(works fine with no security enabled but i'm not that brave