Quote:
Originally Posted by heyyo
its connected via usb, not the modem doesnt have an ethernet socket. not restricted by bandwidth/time
|
I set up mother-in-law's house for wireless at the weekend, with this
Belkin ADSL modem/wireless router.
It would work perfectly well with a mix of PCs and Macs accessing the internet on it simultaneously. She bought it at (shudder) PC World, where they also gave her a free wireless network card for her laptop. Leaving aside the fact that she didn't actually need it as her laptop had one built in already, that was a good deal I think. Presumably they would supply a wireless network card to install in a desktop PC as well.
If you are connecting up multiple computers, consider having as many as possible wireless, otherwise they either all have to sit next to each other, or you have to run lots of cable round the house. You will find it very easy to get the PC to go wireless, but depending on the age and model of the Mac, you may have to stick with wired access for that. All Macs made since the late 90s have an Ethernet port so no problem there, but they tended not to ship with Airport (Apple's branded wireless network card) pre-installed unless you specified it as an optional extra. You can of course go out and buy an Airport card, but IIRC you can no longer buy the older, slower Airport cards that I believe are necessary for older Macs (especially iMacs) - Apple now only seems to sell Airport Express, which is a better, faster card but not, I believe, compatible with older iMacs (certainly not the old colourful plastic ones).
For minimum expenditure, I would buy the belkin modem/router, go wireless with the PC but site the router near the Mac and use the Mac's ethernet port to connect to the router.