Anyone who's ever set up a home-office network (which will, inevitably, turn into a home network) has found that one of the most patience-trying aspects is dealing with the mess of cables. If you've got several family members who want their computers hooked up in various rooms of the house, you might end up with several hundred feet of unsightly network cables running around corners. A wireless router offers a nice tidy solution. Instead of tripping over bundles of network cables, you can set up your router in a central location, install wireless adapters on each machine, and get everyone on your network up and running in almost no time.
D-Link's AirPlusXtremeG wireless router is one option. I'm a hardware technophobe by nature, so I feared the installation process, but was surprised to find it smooth and painless. I did call over my Silicon Valley network architect father for help, but using the instructions that came in the box, we had the router up and running with the SBC Yahoo DSL connection in less than 20 minutes. The adapter installations were a different story. We installed a DWL-G650 laptop adapter and a DWL-G250 PCI adapter. While the PCI adapter went in as smoothly as the router, the driver for the laptop briefly caused a Windows 2000 desktop corruption. Luckily, a few reboots solved the problem and everything was trouble-free from there.
A bonus of the DI-624 wireless router over other available routers is its use of the 802.11g network protocol, which can transfer data up to 54 Mbps, five times faster than those using 802.11b. The DI-624 router requires an Ethernet-based cable or DSL modem and Internet Explorer or Netscape versions 6 and higher. It works with Windows, Macintosh or Linux-based systems, as long as they have an installed Ethernet adapter.
With everything properly installed, the router worked flawlessly and each computer on my home network was able to zoom down the information superhighway, perhaps even faster than before. I'm impressed. Ah, the bliss of being wired without wires!
