Help with wireless

hi, looking for a bit of help/advice. I need to connect a laptop and a PC to the internet in the same house at the same time. They will both be upstairs, and the broadband connection will be downstairs is this possible and what do i need?

 

You have quite a few options here. You will need a router. Whether it is wireless or not, that's up to you. Wired ethernet runs at 100Mbps whereas standardized wireless ethernet runs at 54Mbps tops. You can get pre-standard wireless devices that will run over 100Mbps, but there is no guarantee these will be supported once the new ethernet standard is ratified.

If you choose wired ethernet, once you have the router and some cables, you have all you need! (assuming both computers have network cards).

If you choose strictly wireless, you will need to be sure that you have wireless cards in both machines. It would be prudent to ensure that both are of the same standard (wireless b [11Mbps] or g [54Mbps]), although most routers will support both.

You can also choose to have both wired and wireless ethernet! It is most likely that your desktop has a wired network card. You could connect that to your router with straight through cat-5 cable, and have the laptop use wireless.

 

Both computers will need to be wireless as the broadband is downstairs and Pc upstairs, the Pc is quite old - pIII 800mhz so i'm guessing it wont have the card

 

Only if you're afraid of running cable through the floor. I would assume that this machine doesn't have a wireless NIC, but you can be sure by checking in device manager.