best wifi setup for a large family???

Stooby2

Personally I'd go with ChristopheB's suggestion for all the static machines - PS3's / desktops etc - get them all hooked up with Powerline adapters to relieve the load on the wireless.

You can get a Powerline wireless adapter that you simply plug in, in the room you want a better signal. Not sure how they affect latency, might might be ideal for the phones / 13 yo socialite.

kizatt

what do you all think of this as a possible solution?

Plug and Play 200Mbps AV and 300Mbps Wireless Network Extension

previously i was looking at this router:

N750 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router — Premium Edition
WNDR4300

but now i'm thinking maybe multiple signals around the house might be a better option?

chunter

Surely if there's a fault with DHCP, the fault is more likely to be with the machine that handles DHCP - the router.. But hey if making the IPs static makes your connection work better, who cares...

poet123

Also, check the hub channel settings, we changed ours and kept a diary of which worked better, it was trial and error.

esuhl

poet123 wrote: »

Also, the homegroup, all our PC's run similar operating systems so we did need to set the homegroup up.

You don't need to use a HomeGroup if you don't want to.

chunter wrote: »

Surely if there's a fault with DHCP, the fault is more likely to be with the machine that handles DHCP - the router.. But hey if making the IPs static makes your connection work better, who cares...

The DHCP process starts with the client machine broadcasting a DHCPDISCOVER message. When the DHCP server ("router" in this case) receives the request it returns a DHCPOFFER message containing the IP address for the client. Maybe there was a problem with the way that Windows was sending the DHCPDISCOVER or interpreting/processing the DHCPOFFER message...?

poet123 wrote: »

Also, check the hub channel settings, we changed ours and kept a diary of which worked better, it was trial and error.

The software InSSIDer might come in handy too. It lets you see the all local wi-fi signals and which channels they use, so you can pick a less-crowded one. The channels overlap somewhat, so if you can, pick a channel in free space a few channels away from all other signals.

poet123

esuhl wrote: »

You don't need to use a HomeGroup if you don't want to.

Actually, we found that we did to get a reasonable performance on some of our laptops. When it dropped out of the home group and onto public network, net access was very slow, and the reverse applied. We don't use the options but it did significantly improve performance to have the group setting enabled.

esuhl

poet123 wrote: »

Actually, we found that we did to get a reasonable performance on some of our laptops. When it dropped out of the home group and onto public network, net access was very slow, and the reverse applied. We don't use the options but it did significantly improve performance to have the group setting enabled.

Huh... That is interesting. Probably (yet another) Windows bug...