Re: REQ: Advice on linking home PCs

Stuart Reed wrote:
I need to set up a second PC at home (2 daughters in full time education plus my wife & I heavy users). I have Googled and sought commercial advice but I wonder if anyone out there could offer some first-hand experience before I part with any money.

The two desktops will run WinXP Pro but will need to be wireless. They will need to have access both to the internet and to the My Documents folder and presumably (?) share a printer.

I am based in the UK and have 1MB broadband (from NTL) through a cable set top box.

Any advice gratefully appreciated.

Stuart Reed


That is an easy task. If you want support, call your cable company and ask them if they provide a home wireless networking solution. The advantage is that the cable company will provide some sort of technical support. The disadvantage is that they will charge you a small fee for the wireless router.

If you want to do it yourself, pick up a wireless router, pick up a couple of PCI wireless cards for your desktop pcs, set up file and print sharing for what you want to share, and you are done.

As for wireless routers to hook up to your cable modem, they are pretty much your choice. I have used and set up homes/businesses with Netgear, D-Link, Linksys, and Proxim.

As for what "wireless" card you drop in your desktop computers. There are many out there. My favorite are the Proxim ABG cards, and my least favorite have been the Netgear cards due to driver issues.

Naturally there are come catch 22 situations. Your cable modem may not play nicely with your newly acquired wireless router and it is possible that you will have to clone the MAC address of the PC that is currently connected to cable modem in order to get the wireless router to connect.
Also, some cable modems just do not play well with routing devices.

What it all boils down to is what are your technical abilities to troubleshoot and resolve problems. If they are good, do it yourself. If they are poor, consider asking your cable company to do it for you, assuming they provide such a service.

--
Jon Dough

"The World's Lukiest Man"
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