Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Wireless Router

Hi guys, I am considering a laptop computer and am wanting to go wireless with it. What recommendations would you have for a wireless router. I use Comcast broadband with Mozilla right now.

I've had pretty decent luck with my Linksys WPA54G, which tends to be the most popular one around. I'm also fairly happy with the Apple Airport Extreme Base Station that we have at the office. I've had bad experiences with both Netgear and D-Link, particularly the D-Link.

I have the linksys WRT54G and it works great.

We have a Netgear router in the house and I don't know if it's the router or my computer, but I'm constantly losing the signal and I have to restart the router to pick it back up.

I'm gonna say it's the router because my PS3 losing the signal too, and only picks it back up after resetting the darn thing.

I have both a NetGear something or other and an Airport Extreme: having become a Mac fanboy - or more precisely, a Mac fanoldfart - in the last year or so (after too many years of windoze and more recently Ubuntu Linux, fine alternative that it is), the Airport (and a MacBook or MacBook Pro to go with it), would be my highly recommended choice. And being able to add those amazing little Airport Express units to feed whatever additional analog speakers you might have is an extra bonus.

There. I said it, and I'm glad.

Regards,
David

Thanks guys. So we are talking about one like this ? These seem to get pretty good reviews.

That's the one, but if you're going to be doing any large file transfers, you might want to think about an 802.11n router. The current best example of this is the Airport Extreme Base Station, at least according to a couple of comparison articles about a year ago on arstechnica.

The only downside to the Airport is that it has to restart every time you make a config change. Which is silly.

I'm pretty much just going to use it for music and surfing the net.

Thats the same router I have. Both of my computers are in the same room though, so I am actually hardwired to my router.

I stream music to my denon and play xbox360 over the WiFi, and it works flawlessly.

Rick, I've been using one of these for about 6 years, powered on every second of those 6 years, and have had not one problem with it.

Clearly I need to do something about mine... every month or so I need to restart it to get it to pick up my dsl again. But I'm pretty sure that's a firmware issue with my particular model.

I avoid that only because I periodically reboot (once every couple of months?) my cable modem and the router. If I don't things seem to slow down a bit more than I'd like. It's more to do with the modem than with the router, but I reboot both anyway.

Hmm. Don't have the slowdown problem, it just loses the connection.

It looks as if we have a winner, thanks guys.

wid, also look at the WRT54GL (see the user reviews for both of them on Newegg). There are more GLs sold, the reviews are better and (if you have the courage and knowledge)you can use 3rd party software with it

If you have a signal strength problem (I did), you can pick up a set of high gain antennae from Radio Shack that work well.

Hmmm? Weird! I've never had that problem. Cable vs.DSL??? My brother has DSL, and he loses connection periodically and has to reboot his router and modem.

I've used many routers. Some better than others.

I've never had any problems with Linksys stuff, aside from occasionally needing to update the firmware. My last router was a Belkin, which was fine for about a year and then started having problems maintaining connections and generally occasionally acting flaky. I replaced it with a D-Link DIR-655 based on many internet reviews.

It's been the best router I've ever used. Rock solid stability, tons of features, gigabit nic, up to 300mb 802.11N connections, great range on both 802.11G/N, etc, etc. Likewise, I would have to reboot the Belkin monthly to keep my DSL up and running. Haven't had to reboot the 655 since I first set it up, 3 months ago.

Definitely check it out if you're in the market for a higher-end, heavy-featured consumer router.