What brand of wireless router is best?

[Michael_386]

I am looking into wireless routers. I will have a desktop connect with ethernet. I will have my laptop wireless.

I would also like to network my laptop and desktop together with the router. Is the this possible?

[Jim Mallett · Accepted solution]

Michael,

There are a lot of sites out there that have comparisons, the following site does comparisons and also has some networking tutorials:
http://www.practicallynetworked.com/

Personally I only have experience with Linksys. As far as "out of the box" ease of setup and use it was great. The Linksys homepage has an "Educate Me" section that you might find useful, even if you don't go with Linksys. For example, the following pages gives a comparison of the different wireless standards:
http://www.linksys.com/edu/wirelessstandards.asp

I'm by no means an advocate of Linksys, I would just say do your homework and you'll be happier in the long run.

As far as networking your systems together, yes it is possible and relatively easy. If you're talking Windows, make sure both systems are in the same "workgroup".
Right click "My Computer" on the desktop and choose "Network Identification". And make sure you share out whatever drive, folder, resource you want to share.
Right click the particular folder, choose sharing, and give the resource a share name(this may differ by operating system). So if you share c:\temp on your desktop and the desktop name is HOMEPC, then you can access that from your laptop with:
\\HOMEPC\temp\
Depending on your security/passwords/firewalls there may be further setup.

When thinking about what wireless standard to get, it's always nice to get the latest and greatest but keep in mind that one of the only advantages of 802.11g over 802.11b is if you have an internal network.

Hope this provides some direction....
Jim

[Michael_386]

By internal network do you mean the network between my desktop and laptop? And this would need an 802.11g?

Otherwise the 802.11b will be sufficient?

[Jim Mallett]

Yes, your desktop <--> laptop would be your internal network. You don't "need" an 802.11g for this to work, an 802.11b will work just fine to network them.

I'm trying to think of a good way to illustrate what I meant....basically you're only as strong as your weakest link.

Say for example you have a 3Mb/sec cable internet connection. 802.11b runs up to 11Mb/s and 802.11g runs up to 54Mb/s, either way your network would be faster than your internet connection. So for internet access there is no advantage going with one or the other.

Now on the other hand, you have a large file you want to transfer between your laptop and desktop. For this example we'll assume your network card on your desktop is 100Mb/s. If you have 802.11b, the transfer between desktop/laptop will only be up to 11Mb/s. If you are using 802.11g your transfer could be up to 54Mb/s. This may sound trivial but if you're transferring gigabytes of data it really isn't, it's about 5x faster.

So, 802.11b will do everything you want. 802.11g could potentially do it faster.

If there isn't much difference in cost, I would go with the 802.11g because it is compatible with both. So when I go away on business I take my 802.11g card and I can connect to 802.11g OR 802.11b access points.

I hope this didn't confuse matters. I'll be in/out all this weekend if you want me to clarify anything.

Jim