need help with first wireless router

hi well i bought a studio 1537 and i need a wireless router now. i will be connecting 1 desktop and 1 laptop with the router and my house is 1 story and about 1400 square feet. i dont want to spend over 50 dollars if thats possible. i want a router that has good enough range for my house and that wont die after a couple months. if possible i also want it to work with dd-wrt.
and the wireless card that came with my dell is the Dell Wireless 1510 802.11a/g/n Draft Mini Card. theres also a wireless card in my desktop but im not sure wat it is...

also, do u reccomend setting a password to your network?

 

If you are looking to save a couple of bucks look on ebay for old Linksys WRT54 routers. Ones that work well with DD-WRT, Tomato etc are the WRT54GS versions 1, 2 and 3. WRT54G versions 1 through 4. Also the WRT54GL works well with DD-WRT. Just to name a few. Avoid the newer versions. Newer versions come with reduced RAM and flash memory making DD-WRT installation a pain or impossible. They did this to save some money.
If you want a new one check out the WRT54GL. It is basically the WRT54G version 4 released under the this new name. They released this since there were so many people looking to put DD-WRT etc on the new routers but couldn't due to the reason mentioned above. Here it is for sale on Newegg. It is $57 and free shipping, a little over your budget but it will be new if you are after that. Check out the huge number of sales and reviews for it! Both the old ones and this new one works great, your choice.

Yes, set up wireless encryption for sure. Make sure to go for WPA2 and set at least a 20 place password made up of numbers, letters, special characters and no English words.

 

ok thx and for the wrt54gs/g, how would u know which version your buying?

 

These routers have a serial number on the bottom. Ask the seller for this serial number(or see the picture of the bottom, if they have one in the auction). Once you have the serial number look at the first 4 characters of it. Take these characters and look it up in this table to see which version you have.

Here is another link that is helpful.


That should help.

 

Just to add.
We have a Belkin Router - it did a good job for about 1 year. (no problems)
Then it went "funny" looking at DNS - a firmware update (pre release) seems to have sorted the issue - whatever it was.

Overall I would say I'm happy with the way our Belkin works.

But:
I believe some people on here had a bad experience with Belkin routers.

PS: Stay away from low end Thomson - the one Tiscali sent with out Broadband access (Uk) is useless... (but it was free - and had to cover for our Belkin - now its the Belkin again )

 

I'll volunteer as one of those folks who had a bad experience with a Belkin - lasted for about a year and then started constantly dropping signal during large downloads. Switched to a Netgear and haven't had a problem since.

 

how are netgears? i heard that netgears are pretty bad or maybe that was d-link...im not sure and wat model netgear do u reccomend?

 

Netgear isn't bad at all, although the general consensus around here seems to be that Netgear is not as good as Linksys or Dlink, but certainly much, much better than Belkin. Personally, I would put Netgear above Linksys, but don't have enough experience with Dlink to do anything other than leave it where the consensus puts it.