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alright, here's the background. i recentlu moved into an apartment, and between my roommate and i, we have 4 computers. since we're planning on getting cable internet shortly, we've figured that we should go ahead and set up all of the computers on a router, so as to be able to play LAN games. now here's the fun part. i don't know much about routers. can someone explain the basics of them, or even the average price of a decent router?
I know at home my dad got a router. The cable goes to the cable box, then an ethernet cable goes from the cable box to the router. Then I think you need to have a main computer that needs to be on in order for the network to work. Then you plug in other computers and can even have wireless. I think it's a linksys router and it cost under $100, but don't hold me to that.
We have a Linksys 4 port switch router, and it is great. Plus its really easy to setup. All the setup is done via a web interface to the router, so I can open a browser on any machine connected to the router, type in a special address, and config to my hearts content!
A neat thing our router does is it "dials" our DSL connection for us and keeps it alive. Plus it acts as a firewall so I can have services setup between our computers than only we can see (like printer sharing, FTP, ssh, apache)
I have a linksys as well. it's really easy to use, even I can set it up (I suck at the hardware aspect[s] of computers :p). I have it hooked up to this computer and my brother's (it's only his because he's the only one that uses it). and from what my dad told me, it's very cheap... as far as routers go, anyway, I guess :shrug:
I think the one I got at Best Buy was somewhere between $50 and $100 (for another Linksys 4-port thing). Sorry I can't be more specific price-wise, as it was about 2 1/2 years ago when I bought that.
As has already been pointed out, it's easy to set up: You connect the router to the cable box as though it were a computer to connect to the internet, then you hook all your computers to the router via Cat5 cable. The typical cable-modem-sharing router (a) acts as a firewall, (b) assigns virtual IP addresses to your computers, and (c) provides a web interface that you can access through any computer connected to the router. Depending on your ISP, you may have to do a little configuration of the router in order to get it to talk to your cable modem properly, but getting it to talk to the computers should be really easy. With the router I had, I plugged the cable in and a computer was immediately connected, using the default internet settings provided by both Windows and Linux.
Dude you could just have your own little LAN party with like Unreal Tournament or something.
My brother got a 2.4 GHz Linksys router for about 100$. If you're unsure, ask about Tech support available. It's usually free.