I live in a large sandstone house and my wifi at one end of the house is terrible or none existant on a certain PC attached to my plasma.

I'm with Sky with the supplied wifi router. Can I buy and connect a N rated wifi router to my sky one? and will this help??
If so anyone selling one?

I know another option is to use the mains ring main, but if i do this, then can i attach a router in another room to give me full wifi coverage ?

Advice much appreciated, I have a habbit of buying un-suitable things!

Kevo

we have sky and i use a linksys system that is about 6/7 years old works fine for me as i found the sky wireless drops its signal ALOT

it's more to do with the house i think. It's a sandstone lodge and is far from square, and even the inside walls are 60-80cms thick.

Is it hard to setup the linksys??

thanks,
kev

Slightly awkward this, Sky's terms and conditions specify you use their router. Also you have to do a trick to find your username and password to put into the new router, which always runs the risk of sky changing things and stop this working..

If you are using a usb dongle on the pc, you could change that to a wireless card (if you have a pci slot free in pc) and if necessary use a proper external aerial instead. The standard aerial on the wireless card might be good enough they are often much better than dongles.

Have you tried changing the wireless channel on the router, I found that helped a lot when I was using an outhouse with poor signal.

Mains wire systems tend to be expensive and all my experience (that may not be representative) has been poor.

Just noticed Sky do a wireless-n router now, it might be worth asking if they'll upgrade given your circumstances.

You'd still need to upgrade other devices to get the full benefit of wireless-n

If you're out of contract Sky will offer you all kinds of shiny things to stay with them, a new wireless router is an easy ask, and if they say no, ring back and say that yours has now gone bang and has smoke pouring out of the back of it and what should you do

I've used a mains wiring unit and fitted a hub to the end which I've then ran 5 computers off, works well but this is on new wiring, if you've got the old (fabric covered) stuff you might want to give it a miss.

PCI card will give you a MUCH better signal than a dongle (a USB port only has 500mA) as it can draw more power.

You can buy a Repeater Unit, I know Belkin do one for about £30, but they are only Wireless G not N.

As the dr said the best advice is to use a repeater unit. N technology doesn't allow signals to go through sandstone better despite any claims. My advice is this. Go on to dd wrt web database, find 2 routers that are fully supported and cheap. Flash them both with the new firmware and then use one as a repeater. Excellent firmware fully featured unlike you sky routers.

Good luck

I just installed the disks that came with it then used an ethernet cable running from sky to linksys and all sorted

Hi,
No pci slot as it's a acer revo, (mini pc based on laptop tech), i have it mounted on the back of my plasma, that i'm having problems with. It has internal wifi, but i bought a n rated dongle with no better results, prob as the router wasn't N and i was being thick!!

Yeah i've changed the wireless channel, and that did help, as now my laptop picks it up in the same room that the revo doesn't.

Anyway i've bought "85Mbps Powerline Adapter Twin Pack" from ebuyer for £32 see how they get on.
Can i plug a wifi device into these to put wifi out of them?? instead of having to ethernet them to the acer revo...?

Thanks.

right just an update, i got the powerline adapters (that plug in the mains sockets)

working great, but means i need an ethernet cable plugged in rather than wireless. This isn't a problem as it's a fixed PC that I was having my problem with.

Cheers for the advice.

Good to here the powerline adaptors worked, thanks for the feedback