Many families today have several computers in their household. Having more than one computer in sharing a printer or transferring needed data between computers a total pain unless you have a home network. With home networking equipment costs dropping significantly it is actually easy and affordable to install a mini network in your home.Prior the boom of home wireless networking installation of a home network was a complex and difficult task.


Wires running all through your entire house, the routers was expensive and home routers and switches were new to the market and were much more difficult to setup for the novice. The routers and switches are nearly foolproof; the GUIs (graphic user interfaces) almost do all of the hard work for you. Almost, that is.


The first thing you should do is get all of your computers prepared. Make sure they all have a NIC (network interface card) that will handle your type of network. By type I mean a wireless or wired network?More and more modern houses today are being built with CAT5 ethernet cabling preinstalled. This is the cable that your computer uses to connect to your internet providers router. In a perfect world all networks would be wired. As most routers and switches can handle cable speeds that far surpass any wireless network technology to date. But, most of us don't have Ethernet cable run into every room of our house so we must use a wireless network.If you are going wireless you need to decide on a wireless standard. A wireless standard defines a lot of factors but the factor you are most concerned with is the speed the data will travel.


Today's fastest home network is draft wireless N. Wireless N has a throughput rate of 144 MPS (megabits per second). This is more than double the speed of Wireless G. Also keep in mind that wireless N not only provides more speed, it also provides a much greater range. Wireless N has a range of about 300ft compared for wireless G is approximately 100ft. If you have a small house or apartment wireless G is more than adequate. If, however, your house is medium to a bit on the larger side you must get wireless N. In my house wireless G frequently drops out going to the back room. That is my wife's computer and that ain't good.. When it does it is much slower. With wireless N however, I have no problem in any part of my house.

So choose your wireless standard and then check out 4 Port Wireless Routers Review and read our articles and to select your 4 port wireless router from our offerings. . I recently purchased a Linksys WRT160n but regret not having selected the Apple Airport Extreme Wireless Router Of course, you should do your own research. Read reviews and find your own favorite router manufacturer.

Wireless router wizards will setup everything for you. Simply pop in a CD, go through the basic setup procedures and you will be networked in minutes. I did this with my new router the other day and it was on the air in less than 15 minutes. During the setup you should be asked if you want to setup wireless security on your router. I strongly suggest you do this. If your signal strength is strong enough your neighbors can log on an unprotected system and a car driving by can do the same. This will steal part of your bandwidth, but it also puts all of your data at risk. You definitely need to setup a secure network and make sure to save your password(s).