Get N To Help Your G!

2 Oct 2007

Dawn was fed up. When Dawn is fed up, something has to change. The problem? She kept getting bumped off of World of Warcraft.

We went through an initial round of cable company woes, poor signal, bad wiring, you name it. After that, our signal was much more reliable, but she was still getting bumped off quite a bit. We decided the last loop left in the chain was our super bargain WiFi router we had bought on a sale at CompUSA.

Last night we broke down, made a trip, and purchased a Belkin N Wireless Router. My laptop is the only laptop in the house that supports Draft-N, but I was intrigued by the extended range and I figured a few bucks to add some future proofing can’t hurt.

I got home, plugged it in, renewed some IP addresses and was in the admin screen setting security and network names in a snap. I would go into the setup but this thing works just like every other router I have set up regardless of it being Belkin, Linksys, Dlink, Netgear, whatever. If you have set up one, you can set them all up.

The first thing I did after setting it up was went to check out the kitchen. We have had a kitchen computer for quite a while but the 802.11b USB adapter got a paltry 1Mbit signal if it connected at all. It skipped playing music from iTunes and was generally unreliable. I am happy to report it’s chugging along at a full 11Mbit now and the problems with signal quality have vanished. Score one for the Belkin N.

The next was setting up our laptops, again, punch in a WPA key and bang I was online and pages seem to be loading faster than ever. Both Dawn’s 802.11g and my 802.11n setups are screaming. Score another for the Belkin N.

The last step will be setting up the Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360. I’ll do those tonight and update this article if there are any glitches.

At $90US, this router is a steal. It’s super fast, very nice looking and includes a 4 port switch. Inside I noticed some great advanced firewall features, packet filtering as well as MAC Address level security and a full DMZ for those who need real network capabilities on a dedicated server.

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