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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Graf" data-source="post: 3108378" data-attributes="member: 3087">Ok.I am not a wireless router expert.but i've used for several years, owned several totally blankey-blank ones and I'm here to say that the kind you buy matters immensly.If you get a defective one (and the default state of the industry is defective) it's a nightmare to straighten out. You want to throttle people, your wife is wondering why you're running ethernet cables around the house when you have wireless. You spend hours updating firmware, it never works. etc. etc.Then, after a lot of stressing you get on boards and find a specific model that works consistently and well and buy it and everything is fine (long, boring suggestion and process  follows).The process I suggest:1. You go to the store, you find out a bunch of different models in your price range (brand  and what's on the front of the box don't matter too much in my experience). In particular You get all the little tichy model codes from the back written down (you may need to get them to open the box for you).2.  Go to an internet cafe (or back home) and google. You'll find lots of posts about people complaining or raving about how it works (look, in particular, for posts by moders who do weird stuff like try to turn them into linux boxes; if they're keen on it it'll probably work well).3. Buy the ones you've found raves for. Buy only that one. Check the number twice. Open the box, check the little lables near the S/N.Personally (and I should stress this is like my 4th wirelss router and the first one that worked consistently) I use linksys model WRT54G v4. But I deviated from the process and wasted time and effort.I'd mostly learned my lesson in prior times and I knew that routers are, by default, cheap pieces of **** that don't work. I wanted to get one that did. So I started at step 2 (this would have been a waste if the store hadn't had the one that I wanted).The boards all said that the (linksys) WRT54G was great, it has double the ram (or something) compared to the industry standard and uses some kind of 'better' operating system.Linux people had a whole project around doing something (weird involving servers) with it.So I went to the store and bought it.In principal I'd seen a post about a new verison that supposedly sucked. But I couldn't really remember which verison it was and it didn't say anywhere on the box (it said WRTG54... I mean that's long enough to identify something, right?) and the guy at the store was like "this is a great router" and it was covered in other advertising **** (2.4 ghz!! Secure Easy Setup (tm)!! blah blah blah) and I said "it'll probably be fine".Lesson: Never skip step 3.I get home and it's just like prior (terrible routers) you spend hours updating the fireware and ajusting the position and checking the company site and it still just doesn't work, or needs to be turned off and on (read unpluged and plugged back in) every five minutes and it's total ****.So I go back to the post about "new verison of WRTG bad" and check. They've apparently switched to the industry standard (i.e. total ****) chips which have the memory and use some sort of (****) system that's hardwired into the chips.And it's called WRTG54 v5 and they're making an extra couple of bucks off of using this supercheap chips.I look for this v5 thing but it's not on the box. So I flip over the router and, on a little sticker next to the S/N sure enough there's a little lable that says WRTG54 v5.I go back to the store and the guy's like "yeah, we've had ten returned this week. we got their permission to just swap them out with the older model with the better* chip."* here better = not totally brokenSo I got my WRTG54 v4. And it's brilliant (like once every 3 months it likes to be unpliugged and then plugged back in). If you can find them in the states then I (and at least two dozen rabid linux modders) recommend it.[edited to be a (little bit) easier to read/understand]</blockquote>

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