Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"If you're upgrading to a faster, stronger wireless router, don't chuck your older Wi-Fi box. With the magic of DD-WRT, you can turn your older wireless router into a range-expanding Wi-Fi repeater to cover everywhere you need a connection. The advent of wireless home networks grew slowly in the past decade, but reached the point at which nearly every home with a high-speed connection had a wireless router that shared Wi-Fi connections throughout the home. Now Wireless N has become the standard at electronics retailers, promising faster connectivity with your wireless devices, faster transfer and streaming speeds between devices, and better connectivity. So what's to be done with your home's first wireless router?"

Lifehacker has published an article on how to use your old wireless router to increase the range of your wireless signal about the house. This is something I have done in order to get a decent signal in to the back garden so I can sit in the sun with that glass of wine, my laptop for some light browsing and some music playing. This article does require that you have a compatible router with the required DD-WRT firmware to make it work, but if you have it, then this is a great way to expand your wireless network to those area's where it's weak.

I had a particularly frustrating experience last week that reminded me of my utter contempt for the un-finished wireless protocol that is 802.11n. I do a bit of computer consulting when I have time for it, and someone needs my help, so I was assisting someone with the setup of a laptop. He had purchased an HP dv6700 "Thrive" laptop based on my reccomendation (it's one beautiful machine!) and he also purchased a Linksys WRT160N 802.11n router based on the recommendation of the salesperson at Best Buy. He didn't ask me what kind of wireless router to buy. Can you guess where this is going? He spent over an hour on the phone with Linksys tech support trying to get this router working with his laptop, but he was never able to get a connection that lasted for longer than a few seconds. He returned the Linksys router and tried again with the same model, with the same results. That's when he called me for help. Read more...