I have an eight-year-old desktop with no wi-fi capability that’s hardwired directly to my cable modem. It works fine (slow, but fine.)
I recently got a new laptop and an iPod touch but without a router, I can’t go online with them.
My needs are as simple as can be: just emailing and casual surfing. I live in an apartment so the laptop and iPod wouldn’t be more than 30 feet or so from the router.
My questions:
Can I connect a router to the desktop by some kind of cable (I presume an Ethernet cable, but I’m not sure about that) and still have the laptop and iPod connect wirelessly?
The research I’ve done makes me think all I need is a single-band router with both wired and wireless technology. Am I right?
And does anyone have any recommendations for such a router?
For your purposes, just look for a router that has the words Wi-Fi AND “# Port” that is. “2 Ports” or “4 Ports” or more. You’re only going to need 1 port, but having a spare is always nice.
Cisco/Linksys have done me well in the past. I’ve had a lot of them die after a few years, but I’ve heard better things about them after Cisco took after. Besides, assuming the GUI is similar to what I remember, they’re the most user friendly ones I’ve played with. I’ve had good luck with Netgear, but they’re a PITA to set up and I wouldn’t recommend them for someone that didn’t know their way around a router. D-Link isn’t too bad either. Plan to spend $50ish dollars on it. Don’t get some piece of junk no name $20 wi-fi router. That’s the kind of thing that’ll likely overheat and break in a few months.
Depends what you need to do. If all you’re doing is splitting your internet up between a handful of wired devices and you aren’t concerned about wireless security or changing defaults…it’s not and it’ll work out of the box. Plug the modem into the router (to the port marked WAN or Internet) and the rest of the devices into the other ports and you’re good to go. You should be up and running in a matter of minutes unless you need to enter any ISP passwords.
If you have, say, 3 wireless devices, you want to change the default password on the router and you want the wifi secured but everything else is staying the same (which is more then adequate for most users). It’s not too difficult and if you’re asking this question, I’d plan on spending at least an hour to get it all up an running. Once you know your wifi password, you’ll be able to get new devices on in a matter of seconds. Just make sure you pick a name for your router that is easy to spot. If you leave it as LINKSYS or BELKIN-A, you’re not going to know which one is yours. Then it’s hard to tell if your doing something wrong or just trying to log into the neighbor’s router.