DescentBB

In two weeks, I'm going to be heading home from college from the summer. During that time, I'm planning on setting up my own system in my room. I was toying around with the idea of purchasing a wireless router; that way, I wouldn't have to rely on sharing the family PC, which is a clunker and has an intense hatred of me (seriously ), with five other people. The only trouble is, I have absolutely no knowledge about routers in general, wireless cards, or pretty much anything having to do with networking computers or sharing a connection. (Yes, I may possibly be crazy. )

My question to the some learned members of this board is if such a setup would be feasible, given my situation. My family's PC is downstairs; we have a single cable modem and Comcast broadband service. The cable input to the house is on the complete opposite side of the house as my room and one floor down, so there's no chance of running a separate line to my room. (As a side note, I would dearly love to have cable in my room if only just for TV, but seeing my father's track record with laying wires through walls, maybe I'm better off this way. ) My room is separated from the room with the modem by several layers of wall/floor. By your estimation, would buying a wireless router be an option at all, much less a reasonable one? (From what I understand, wireless connections aren't exactly the best for gaming; this isn't a huge problem, as I'd be perfectly able to use the family PC for my online action.) I've heard in the past that Comcast doesn't approve of routers; would this create any problems? Finally, if it turns out that this would all be doable, does anyone have any good recommendations for a wireless router setup? I'm not looking for something top-of-the-line, just something that'll do a reasonable job, and hopefully something that's relatively cheap.

Thanks in advance for any help. If you're thinking that buying a wireless router just for the summer may be a waste, I'm expecting that my family will eventually get another PC, so it would most likely come in use in the future.

I have a wireless Linksys WRT54GS. It's a wireless G class which does 54Mbits. It has both WEP and WPA encryption so using WPA will stop most fo the script kiddies from hacking your connect.

Buy the router, buy a Linksys Wireless G NIC (PC or Laptop, your choice as to where you want it). Plug the router into your cable modem and let it find all the info itself. There are very simple instructions in the router box for this setup.

Once it's done, just plug your home PC's into it and they will be able to surf without a hitch.

For the wireless access, you'll need to point your brower to 192.168.1.1 and go into the Router setup. I'd advie setting a UN and PW for this so no one else can get in from inside or outside your network.

From here, you click thw wireless part and setup speed (G only), your SSID, Channel, and make sure you set SSID broadcast to disable.

In the Wireless Security part, set it to WPS-Shared-Key, TKIP algorythm, and setup the wireless key. Write or copy that key down cause you will need it to connect your other PC/laptop to the wireless network.

In the MAC filter area, have it only allow the MAC address of the PC/laptop you want on it. This will stop 99% of ppl who do hack your network (highly improbable) to fo anything.

The rest you can experiment with. The apps and gaming is port forwarding. This is for stuff like FTP, Kali port settings or if you want to HOST any services or servers.

If you need more help, let me know.

If for some reason after you do this your signal is not that strong, you may need to buy a seperate wireless access point to put between you and the router to boost the signal.

I don't understand the vast majority of your post, but thanks for the advice. I'll probably be able to get a better handle on what I need to do once I get home and browse around a computer store or two.

Don't worry to much, when you buy this router and start setting it up, it has little descriptions for everything.