100ft is pretty far. Most wireless routers effective range is about 50ft. You can always get a wireless signal booster. Computer platform does not matter.

Caix is right. platform doesn't matter.

however, regarding repeater: I recommend staying away from linksys.

holy crap, I really wanted to like it, but I can't get it to work with WPA at all, works WEP but not WPA. Linksys support sucks balls.

with wireless, the farther the distance, the less bandwidth. nonetheless, if you are just talking about surfing on the internet, your internal network will have significantly higher bandwidth. so even if you are far away from your router, with it's 3Mbps connection, it will be the choke point, not your wireless connection.

re: repeaters, it will suck up half of the bandwidth if you are using it in wireless repeater mode. good for increasing coverage, but not great for maintaining bandwidth. best thing for a repeater is to use an ethernet connection to connect the repeater with the router. that way, you can still use higher WPA type encryption as well.

Stay away from Apple. Their stuff is terribly overpriced. But you use Macs so you already know this.

I have never had any particular trouble with Linksys products. They've always performed reliably for me. Linksys is the home networking division of Cisco, the company that pretty much built the entire Internet.

However, if you want a good alternative I'd recommend 3Com, D-Link or NetGear, in that order.

Colonel Panic wrote:I have never had any particular trouble with Linksys products. They've always performed reliably for me. Linksys is the home networking division of Cisco, the company that pretty much built the entire Internet.

However, if you want a good alternative I'd recommend 3Com, D-Link or NetGear, in that order.

Yeah, I generally choose linksys for clients, but the repeater thing kind of spoiled that.

I think getting the linksys one that can be flashed to a linux OS is the one to get. then you can do ANYTHING with it.

I've never done that! Maybe I'll just have to try it...

Linux can be made to run on anything. Macs, Xboxen, iPods, phones... even Palm Treos. In fact, they're reworking Palm OS, basing it on a Linux kernel. How awesome is that?

I have a Lynksis wireless router and I can attest that Linksys has their head up their asses as far as support goes. There was no instructions or installation disc for the Mac, nor were there instructions on their website to set up the router with a Mac. Normally, this is not an issue (using DSL), but since I have cable internet, everything has to be assinine.

I called Lynksis and they had me do some circus tricks and it worked just fine. It was so easy, I wanted to ask why Linksys didn't bother printing a paragraph in the instruction manual for Mac users, but that would be futile asking a simple question like that.

Avoid anything from Hawkings.

this is the one to get:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6833124190

Wireless N and a router that does MIMO might manage it. Hell, a MIMO wireless G router might do it but if you want to put some moolah into it go for N.

Only problem is you might need a new network card too! But even for dirty MACs you can get the old USB dongle things.

Avoid Linksys, unless you can get one of the older Linux ones which allow you to put your own firmware on it. The new VxWorks-based ones are pure poo.

Christ, they don't even allow you to setup DHCP with IP address affinity (so that a particular computer will get associated with the same IP address from DHCP each time it reboots). Fucking retarded.

stewie wrote:Avoid Linksys, unless you can get one of the older Linux ones which allow you to put your own firmware on it. The new VxWorks-based ones are pure poo.

Christ, they don't even allow you to setup DHCP with IP address affinity (so that a particular computer will get associated with the same IP address from DHCP each time it reboots). Fucking retarded.

You could use DHCP with a static IP on the client. So this feature is not really needed.

And I like Linksys. I never had any WLAN router with a larger range.