Recommend Me a Wireless Router

[Stromgarde]

I've had my Linksys WRT54G for 4 years now, and it finally shit itself and doesn't want to work anymore. Installing dd-wrt didn't do anything for me. So! I'm looking to upgrade to N band technology, and I would greatly appreciate it if any of you folks would be able to help me out here.

[Norellicus]

N is still a draft tech and not worth the extra expense the market will try to shove on you for it, I wouldn't bother myself specifically upgrading to it. However, I can appreciate the fact that it's holding a majority of the market in a lot of places so if the pricetag isn't really any higher then there's nothing wrong with an N-band either.

Buffalo finally reintroduced its shit to north america, and they make some top-notch stuff; might look into one of those.

[Amastacia]

I'd recommend another Linksys, but I work for Cisco so I'm biased. :D

[Norellicus]

Unless they've improved in reliability significantly in their last year or so, Linksys is unfortunately a very bad choice despite being underwritten by Cisco...their devices seem to frequently get CPU stack problems that cause self-rebooting a LOT when under high load.

Your average user wouldn't notice but anybody who does anything heavy duty like torrenting and online gaming would have issues.

[Hellfury]

I'm very fond of my D-Link DIR-655 ^^
Easy to configure, range seems to work decently, but I'm nowhere near a professional on wireless networking.

[Maiev]

The higher-end of D-Link Router is pretty good. My brother uses one and says it pwns Linksys Routers.

However, if you want to err.. be a little geek and love playing with router configurations, then get a Linksys and patch it with DD-WRT. You get to play with very fancy things in there :D such as bridging AP's together, or even setting up a pay hotspot :D to make some money hehe (could potentially pay your monthly internet bill :D)

[0ni0n]

I would recommend a linksys WRT54 series and tomato firmware, the best combination you can get in terms of cost efficiency and hardware competency.

[Stromgarde]

What sort of price range would I be looking at for a good Buffalo router? One of the main concerns is that I'm in an apartment complex and everyone and their mother also has a wireless router, so I'm looking at a lot of interference on the G and B bands.

[Olo401]

I think I need to do this as well.. the wifi adapter on my old machine (Motorola WPCI810G, Broadcom 4306/4320 chipset) refuses to work correctly under Win7 no matter what drivers I use. I have that little Linksys USB unit on my main machine and it works great, but I'm not sure if I get a second one if there will be a conflict or not.

[Norellicus]

The buffalo units look like they range from 50-100, depending on bells and whistles, though looks like they're still kind of hard to find since they *JUST* reintroduced their north american line.

End of this month they're supposed to be releasing a new dual-band N router that operates outside the cordless phone range to limit interference; market price is set at $99.

[Blabj]

Chuffed with Buffalo products, their tech support is decent, and they understand you may wish to put DD-WRT on it (they have licenced the firmware for some of their products even) and putting such firmwares on your router, in my experience, does not void your warranty as long as the problem is not related to the firmware.

I do agree with previous statements about draft-n, and personally I wont be upgrading to it for a long while. If you're doing stuff like video streaming, you really shouldn't be using wifi anyway.

[raginbull]

I currently use a Netgear DG834G. Ive had it for 4 years now and it's still going strong. I would happily recommend them.
Anyone else used a Netgear? Also, I use WEP encryption on it. It has an option for WPA-PSK as well but I havent had any problems with WEP. Is WPA really that much more secure?

[Olo401]

Actually I read something recently on how easy it was for wardrivers to hack WEP & WPA encrypted wireless networks.. I won't link for obvious reasons (and frankly I keep my sources close to my vest hehe)

[Cephius]

I currently use a Netgear DG834G. Ive had it for 4 years now and it's still going strong. I would happily recommend them.
Anyone else used a Netgear? Also, I use WEP encryption on it. It has an option for WPA-PSK as well but I havent had any problems with WEP. Is WPA really that much more secure?

WEP can be cracked in short order with just a laptop and a little bit of time. WPA is much much more secure from that standpoint.

WEP is enough for a college campus or apartment building for just basic security to prevent douchebags from stealing your internet. Unless you're paranoid of people trying to break into your network, there's really no need to go WPA.

[0ni0n]

Use WPA or WPA2 for enhanced security. Also, mac users may struggle to maintain a wifi connection with WPA encrypted router, myself included (1 mac and 2 pc at home). Apparently, macs don't play nice with WPA.

[Blabj]

3 macs in the house using a WPA2 Personal Encryption on the network using AES. No such problems. If anything it's the Vista machines which don't play ball as well, with my old desktop sometimes flat out refusing to connect for no aparent reason.

There used to be a program for Intel macs that would packet sniff neighbouring WEP networks, and so long as there was activity on the network it would, over a short course of time, provide you with a working network key to connect (illegally, if you wish) to a network. I'm relatively sure that this program was made by Germans and outlawed due to some laws passed. Probably mirrored elsewhere though, haha.

[Evelyn]

In terms of the kind of router, yes as a general rule draft-N isn't worth the money, however the D Link DIR-655 is the exception to the rule. Has fantastic backwards-compatibility with G devices and better range and reliability than most. I live in a house with a ~1600 sqft footprint, and I can have the router on one side of the house and my computer a floor down and on the opposite side and still get upwards of 80% signal reliability. Now if I can just figure out why my computer is refusing to connect to it sometimes, I'll be golden.

In terms of WEP vs. WPA, WPA is strictly superior, however isn't always necessary. Most routers come with WPA anyway though, so if your network cards all support WPA, use that. Otherwise, unless you suspect people are hacking into your network, WEP should work fine. If you're doing anything incredibly sensative at home where the type of encryption is important, you shouldn't be using wireless in the first place.

[Melena]

Am I the only one who uses Netgear? I have a Netgear Rangemax that i've been using for over 2 years, zero problems.

[Jefe]

I've used:

• 2Wire
• Netgear
• Lynksys

For some reason lynksys has always given me (and friends) problems. The 2Wire got it for free when signing up for ATT DSL, got it like 4 years ago and the shit works fine.

[Olo401]

I've used:

• 2Wire
• Netgear
• Lynksys

For some reason lynksys has always given me (and friends) problems. The 2Wire got it for free when signing up for ATT DSL, got it like 4 years ago and the shit works fine.

I've used D-Link, Netgear, Linksys, and Motorola.. All have been fairly good to me (the Motorola one doesn't want to work w/ Win7). I tend to hear people have problems with either Netgear or Linksys tho..