Our household is feeling a bit of a loss right now. The desktop computer that is located in my son’s room has finally bit it. I’m not sure if it’s the computer itself, I think the culprit may be a dead power supply. With the computer out of commission at least temporarily the discussion on whether or not to revive it has been opened.
The old Compaq Presario has served in a capacity of really only three roles since my wife and I have both had laptops now for quite some time.
- central hard drive storage for family music and photos
- base computer to connect family printer
- computer for kids to play their online games
My ultimate goal is to install a Windows Home Server machine at some point in the near future. A friend of mine is running that system and has been happy with it’s performance and usefulness. He’s a system administrator at a large state university, so I highly value his input and opinion on system use.
In the interim, I’m trying to determine if what I want to do is just install a wireless print server to fulfill that missing role on the family network right now. I’ve been looking at a few online and found this Netgear WGPS606 54 MBPS Wireless USB Print Server with 4-port switch.
It looks like it will do exactly what I want, even allow me to attach two different printers. The other thing I didn’t think about though is that it would also extend my wireless network and allow me to hard wire other devices to the location as well. I’m thinking that would allow me to install network storage devices as well.
Curious what everyone else’s experience has been with these devices? Good? Bad? Reliable? How have you extended your network using the device? I’m also curious if I could use this device as a way to extend the wireless network from my parent’s house across the street to my dad’s office. Would the extension features work in that way?
