Need a Set & Forget upgrade for my aged parents?

[duncan7]

I about to go visit my folks for a couple of days. As typically happens on these trips, my dad's got a few tech jobs spooled up for me, including unboxing a new thinkpad he's bought to replace his dying T-40.

They're running a Linksys wrt-54g, which has been doing pretty well. It's been awhile since I looked at their signal strength, but I know it reaches from the second floor down to their Blu-ray and lets them stream Netflix. Their incoming WAN is Comcast 6 megabit, IIRC, and besides the occasional connection from the Blu-ray and a Wii, there are no other wireless clients.

While I'm messing with stuff up there, would there be any benefit to pre-emptively swapping out the 54G and going to an something that does N? I was thinking it couldn't hurt to swap it out for something like a Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH, just for somewhat better throughput vs. distance, but the disappearing SSID bug is exactly the kind of thing I don't want to introduce to their setup.

I'm running a linksys 400N at home and it's been pretty stable (with the stock firmware, DD-WRT wouldn't hold a connection on the 5Ghz band for more than a couple hours). There's some advantage, in my mind, to being able to visualize the web interface locally in case their connection goes south and I have to troubleshoot it over the phone. That said, folks seem to be less and less satisfied with the post-acquisition Linksys stuff. So...

Should I leave well enough alone or is there something solid in the sub $60 range that would be a worthwhile upgrade?

 

[thiggins]

I would tend to leave things alone, especially since if you break it, you need to fix it...remotely.

You won't get a benefit from switching to N unless the client supports N.

 

[duncan7]

You won't get a benefit from switching to N unless the client supports N.

Well, yeah. I actually spec'd the new machine I'll be setting up with the 62095 (2x2) Centrino N upgrade over the stock ThinkPad N radio. Unless my folks are using the blu-ray (G) or wii (G), when they're unlikely to be on the laptop, that laptop is the only client, so the whole network could be N.

I hear you on the "if it ain't broke" recommendation, though. Thanks.

 

[thiggins]

If you want to try N, I'd stay simple with single band and 10/100 ports. A refurb'd Cisco Linksys E1200 is only $30 from the Cisco store with free shipping and 90 day moneyback.

If you want something a bit more "pro", consider the Ubiquiti PowerAP N, which despite its name, is a router.