Computers & Networking

[shrodecf]

I am not too "techy" so this question may get everyone laughing. I have a desk top PC with a wired router. I recently bought a laptop to use when we travel. I would like to use it wireless both at home and on the road. We would utilize the available wifi where we travel so that is not a problem. I was told there are routers that are both wired and wireless that could be used at home. Is this the best economical solution or would it be more economical to convert the desk top to wireless? What is the process for either?

[Starflyer59]

The majority of wireless routers come with 3-5 ports for connecting your desktop as a wired connection. I really like the Linksys WRT300N wireless router.

[Entropy]

It's almost unheard of to get a wireless router that doesn't have wireless ports.

If your desktop is wired, I strongly reccommend keeping it that way.  Wired will always be faster and more reliable than wireless.  Even 100Base-T (100 megabit Fast Ethernet) wired connections will usually be faster than Wireless-N in real-world usage.  (The reason is because wired Ethernet actually allows for 100 megabits each way simultaneously per machine on the network if connected to a switch, while wireless shares 300 megabits between all machines on the network for both directions, including "dead time" required between the last time a device received something and when it may transmit.)  Nowadays nearly all new PCs and most routers have gigabit Ethernet support.

Also, unless transferring data between computers on a network, anything faster than 54 Mbps 802.11g (aka Wireless-G) is of no benefit, as most internet service providers limit users to 5-15 Mbps at most.