I should clarify; in my eyes, I'm not wasting money but considering the economy some would definitely call it a waste: I'm investing cash on my home network.
It started off as a simple task; stream media from my computer to my laptop. Initially, I figured I'd go the cheap route and get a wireless N router: no thought, just run out and get wireless N.
What I ended up getting was a single band router with a 100Mb switch. Needless to say, the little improvements I found were quickly tainted by new problems. It was a situation described simply: I rushed into a purchase and didn't get what I needed.
Fast forward a year and a half and now I'm ready to tackle the problem again. Unfortunately, I didn't internalize much of my last experience: all I remembered was that it didn't work like I had hoped.
So now, I figured I wanted something that was top of the line. I was looking at the sleek Asus routers but the limited speed on the 5Ghz frequency bugged me. That and the fact that reports said their new router was on the way that corrected these issues.
A visit to Fry's helped me realize the Netgear N900 accomplished everything I was looking for. Again though, I didn't assess my present network so I wouldn't be able to take advantage of the speeds at all.
Playing around with the router, I found out that my cables didn't even support 1Gb transfer speeds. That bothered me mainly because I had recently purchased a bunch of ethernet cables. Turns out I had bought Cat5 cables. On top of that, my laptop's wireless card didn't even support the 5Ghz frequency so technically I had nothing that would even be running on the wireless N band which I had found out the year before with the other router but had forgotten. Anyway, I ended up spending 60 on new. Cat6e cables, 40 on a wireless card for the laptop and eventually I'll be needing a 1Gb switch as well which will run in the 100s. So, excluding time, I'm already at 300 spent with nothing notably awesome.
I will say though that it was cool installing the card into the laptop. I had to install an antenna myself. I've already clocked double the speed on the laptop, maxing out at 100Mb, the maximum transfer speed my computer can manage with Cat5. Also, I would have never realized I was using older cables had I not had the N900.
Though the ultimate goal had been to be able to stream movies from my computer to a wireless laptop without jitters, it's now evolved into having a topnotch network so if I need to transfer anything, it'll be blazing fast. Lol, now that I think about it, the N900 probably doesn't have USB3 so there's one lingering bottleneck I hadn't considered. Either way this thing goes, it's been a great learning experience.
