Hope I dont fall foul of the OT chopper, but Im clueless and looking for some advice from any networking gurus out there.
Im looking to buy a laptop shortly, for my wife who needs one for a university course. Shes going use this primarily for word processing, but it isnt going to be much use without internet access, plus printing abilities.
Currently weve got a standalone PC with an ADSL broadband connection through a modem. Im figuring I should aim to create a wireless network, to allow sharing the broadband connection, printing to the printer attached to my PC, and file sharing from laptop to PC which will allow me to organise storage for backups etc.
Im confident with PCs but I know nothing about networks. Based on my research I know I need a wireless router, but there are a lot of grey areas. Heres what I think the basic layout of my network 'hub' should look like:
phone socket - modem - wireless router - PC
The PC is my MC PC. It seems that I could put a wireless access point on the PC and potentially move it anywhere away from the router, but I dont need to do this and it seems that I would be losing network speed if I went wireless with the PC as I have reportedly 576kbps downstream from the modem. Then the laptop needs a wireless access point, or if its a Centrino the wireless access is built in so no additional device required(?). Centrino is something Im particularly confused about. I know there are various flavours of 802.11 but the minimum 11Mbps Ive read about sounds fine for what the laptop would need.
I havent even thought about WinXP configuration etc yet - Im mainly interested in getting the hardware right at this point. Can anyone offer advice? Have I got this basically right?