Networking Hardware

NETWORKING HARDWARE, WIRELESS NETWORKING, LAN, WAN, WIFI
 
These days, computers aren’t standalone devices by a long shot; they’re connected to printers, scanners, faxes, other computers, and often required to synchronize with any number of devices. To manage these acts of communication, you need networking hardware. The articles in this section take a look at the various routers on the market, both wired and wireless, and tell you what to expect.

How to Connect Two Routers on the Same Network

In a big home network, sometimes one router is just not enough. If you find that's true in your situation, keep reading. This article will explain how (and why) to connect two of the most popular routers on the same home network.

There are a lot of situations in which one router may not be enough. For example, if you live in a large house, or one where signals cannot penetrate to certain areas, you may find that one router (especially a wireless router) cannot cover the whole area. This means that certain areas will experience weak wireless reception, affecting your web surfing/networking pleasure.

You might also have problems with other limitations in how the network was set up. For instance, it might be impractical to use long LAN cables to cover all of the computers on the network with a single router.

If you can connect two routers on the same network, you can increase your chances of providing interactivity, security and strong Internet/ networking signals to the computers on the network.

This tutorial will cover two of the most popular Linksys routers, namely: WRT54G and WRT54GC. WRT54G is a big and powerful wireless router, making it ideal for use as the "root" or "main" router. WRT54GC is a smaller and compact router, ideal for use as a "room" or "secondary" router. Both of these routers can handle wireless communication and be used in laptops, net books or computers with wireless LAN cards.


Also, the operating system we are using is Windows (this will extend to any version of Windows -- Windows XP, Windows 7 or the older versions).

Even though this tutorial will focus primarily on Linksys routers, networking principles can extend to other types of routers used in the office and home network. If all of your computers and hardware are ready, keep reading. Also, this tutorial assumes that your main home network can be broken down into two sub networks (namely network 1 and network 2), which are physically far from each other).

COMPUTER CASES

 

PC CASES, TOWER CASES, CASE MODS
  
Computer cases hold all of the pieces of your computer system together, protect them from the elements, and help keep them functioning at the optimum temperature. But they can also make it easy (or difficult) to upgrade your system, help it run quietly (or too loud), be portable for LAN parties (or not), or just plain look really cool. This section tells you what you can expect from that hot-looking case that suddenly wants to come home with you.      


COMPUTER PROCESSORS, FAST CPUS, AMD, INTEL, CPU REVIEWS
   
Thanks to Moore's Law, computer processors keep getting faster and more powerful all the time, making last year's system all but obsolete for playing next year's games. Lately, a computer processor's performance has been influenced by more than just the number of transistors, however, as chip makers have tried to add a number of new capabilities. Read the articles in this section to find out what these are, and how they affect what you want to do with your system.