Broadband router choice, need help!

I'm buying a laptop with a Intel Pro 5100 WiFi card. I have desktop I built myself with Gigabyte LAN. I have a two story townhouse and the laptop will mostly be on the opposite floor from the router. I also like to sit out in my yard with my dog while I'm using the laptop for school work so it does need some range.

I have a fairly high technology level, and I'm looking for a good broadband router to tie it all together.

I'm looking at a DIR-655 atm, but what I would like are 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports, 2-4 is fine. Broadband connection.. 10/100 would be okay or 10/10/1000 doesn't really matter. And up to 300Ghz for the WiFi.

I know this is a bit excessive in some regards because I will be bottle necked by my ISP (cable), but I do a good enough chunk of file transferring between the two computers that I don't want to self impose a bottleneck on myself for the sake of $50.

I also don't want to take out a second mortgage for the router though! Something around the $100 mark wouldn't hurt to bad as long as it was quality.

Edit: Oops, I should of mentioned that I know N won't provide much over 100Gbps most of the time, even if I'm lucky. But, I plan on setting it up so it can use wired or wireless so I can choose based on what I'm doing to take full advantage of the Gigabit LAN ports.

 

You do know that the DIR-655 has GigE ports and 802.11n, right?

 

The DIR-655 has Gigabit ethernet ports (10/100/1000) and Wireless N (Usually 130mbps, but can reach 300mbps).

...

 

Yeah what I was really looking for were alternate suggestions or maybe input on someone who knew more about brand names. Anyway I pulled the trigger.. then spent an hour on the phone with Tech Support. Then he told me to return it to the store, so I fixed it myself. Idiots.. I hate outsourcing.

Anyway.. now I'm only getting up to about 68 Mbps even when I'm sitting on top of the router.

Wireless card is a Intel Pro 5100, DIR-655 router. I set it to N only running 2.4Mhz WPA2 AES 40Mhz.

And I completely locked down the router by limiting DHCP range to 3 addresses and then reserved those 3 addresses, as well as turning off broadcasting. And yes I remember to set the Admin password!

Any other settings or tips I should look for or consider? I'd like to bump the range some and I think my security is pretty good atm. I could do MAC filtering too but I got lazy.

 

Register the router, join the D-Link beta forum, and check out the sticky for the DIR-655. It has all of the settings to get 300Mbps. You can also check out some of my earlier posts - I explained how to configure the DIR-655 to extend range and get over 140Mbps.