Hi, Afew questions :)

[EternityEight]

Ive been looking around the internet and reading old posts on these forums for a while but im still unclear on afew things;

At the moment my network@home is as follows:

cable modem on the first floor
1 main pc on the first floor (i.e ground floor)
1 pc on the second floor
2 laptops on the third floor


All the pc's/laptops plug into a hub in the third floor; the main pc is an ICS host and has two network ports, one plugging into the cable modem, to share the connection.

Now, i want to WiFi-fy the network, but am on a limited budget, so here are my questions;

Can i use my main pc (with a 802.11g pci network card) as an internet connection host, just as with a wired network? (with the obvious disadvantages

Not using a wireless router/access point and running the network in "peer to peer mode" will a 802.11g network be able to spread accross the three floors of the house; bearing in mind that the internet must be shared through that computer.

If the network will stretch across said distances, what speeds should i be expecting, after overheads, the network will only really be used for web browsing.

Interference? no cordless telephones here, but in practice, how serious of a problem is it?

now, from what ive seen on these forums, whenever anyone posts people always ask more questions, so ill try to give as much info as possible.

All the PC's are will be running windows XP home, and that cant be helped...
The distances are pretty standard for any house -- two floors and a converted loft, if that makes any difference
I plan to buy 802.11g cards (backward compatible)


Ive not bought any gear yet, so my options are still open, but as i say, I am on a tight budget; so if youve got any ideas please say

Anyways, thanks for any replies, this forums seems to be quite friendly so hopefull no flames :D

Cheers,

ee

[M/Q]

Welcome to the forum. I am going to try and talk you out of a large part of what you want to do. One big reason to use wireless is because you cannot run cables. You have already. Second the only two computers that are portable are in the loft. Are you going to want to use them all over the house or just up there? Now for many reasons wireless is no where near as fast as a wired network. The wired network will work much better and be light years more stable. ICS/wireless will also cause a slowdown to a point that you will not like it at all. I am concerned that you will spend a lot of money and have worse results and less useable bandwidth than you have now even with the wireless system working perfectly. One other hidden problem is that older computers, actually even newer ones with Ethernet cards are not always going to play nice with the addition of another networking card and may have all sorts of problems with IRQ conflicts.

The approach you are thinking about is probably one of the hardest to get to work right. You have no wiggle room trying to get the clients to talk to each other. It also is just very tough to have that many clients on an Ad hoc network. It is not something I would recommend.

OK, now to what I would consider an improvement in bandwidth and security. First, I would have a wired router/switch on the first floor just downstream of the cable modem. It will act as a firewall and isolate all your computers from the Internet. It will be much faster than the box using ICS, along with a huge increase in security. Plug that computer into the wired switch portion of the router and it will be happy. Next connect the cable going up to the hub into the wired switch portion of the router as well. Here is where I need some more information. If the notebooks are staying in the loft, just get an access point and plug it into the hub for both of the notebooks. Keep the first floor PC plugged into the hub as it is now. You also have another option. If you want the notebooks to move around more, than all you have to do is logically locate the AP to get the best coverage. It could be moved to the first floor if you wanted to.

So, there it is a more secure network with fewer bottlenecks. The fact that you do not have to pay for 2 wireless PCI adaptors will be the price of a good access point. The funny part about this is if you wanted to go totally wireless, I would recommend almost the identical thing. You just need to add the 2 extra PCI adaptors.