Network advice

[suppafreak]

I am looking in to upgrading my current network. Attached is the image of setup that i have now.

Currently I am using the D-link WBR-2310 router with many different devices that are mostly 802.11 b/g. Mostly there are no problems. I have several shared drives on my laptop, which is connected wirelessly. For some reason if I have laptop ON for a long time I loose the connection to it from other computers and cannot access the drives. I have to reboot the laptop and PC from which I am trying to access the drives and then it works, until the connection drops again.

So, I am thinking to upgrade the router and network card on the laptop. After reading several reviews I have decided on D-link DIR-825 or Linksys WRT610N. I am still not sure which performs better, all the reviews have them pretty much equal, but I am leaning toward Linksys.

I am trying to improve the file transfer speed between the Laptop, NAS and PC1. I have large image files and software on the NAS and need to improve the transfer speed. Both PC1 and NAS has Gigabit connections.

In any case, maybe a networking guru can recommend whether I will gain any performance improvements by upgrading or I should keep the router I have now.

Thank you.

 

[Madwand]

You have several performance bottlenecks in your network -- wireless, wireless-g, 100 Mb/s wired, NAS, and powerline. In general going to gigabit is a straightforward step towards improving performance, but in your case you would still be hampered by the NAS and wireless, etc.

Draft-n wireless certainly can be faster than what you have, but wireless performance depends on many factors and is hard to predict. Unless things go your way, you could end up with wireless performance no better than standard-g. Running in 5 GHz can mitigate interference and crowding effects, but can suffer from poorer range.

I would probably do what you're thinking -- go to dual-band draft-n and gigabit as upgrades. I suggest the DIR-825 because its switch supports jumbo frames and your NAS might be able take advantage of that somewhat.