802.11b/g or router?

[Squick]

Yall are starting to make me wonder if you have ever even used wireless anything.

My wireless keyboard has lasted me over a year, and I have not even touched the single triple A battery in it. My wireless mouse has a cradle that I drop it into every couple weeks to charge.

As for gaming, how much bandwidth do you guys think gaming takes? If you think wireless is not fast enough, neither is your cable modem, nor is 36 T-1 lines! A 802.11g connection is the same speed as 36 T-1 lines, that is the same as a T-3 connection... More bandwidth then most small colleges have! Also from my direct observation, as in the router sitting next to me, and the g card in my laptop, not some hearsay, it is exactly half as fast as 100 base T, I was able to transfer at 5 megaBYTES a second... 600 megs of data took just over two minutes to transfer, on a T-1 that would have taken 52 minutes, on the very fastest cable modem out there that would have taken 25 minutes. The only thing I can think is some people have heard that wireless can be unreliable, 802.11a was unreliable because it was a 5.4ghz signal instead of the more stable 2.4 with signal hopping.

And to address your last fear, that a router will mess with your connection. It will! If you are plugged straight into your cable modem right now, you are at an extreme risk of being hacked unless you have absolutely every Microsoft patch. A router negates 99.9% of those vulnerabilities. And if you really want to be totally open, you can enable something called "DMZ" on your router, which will forward everything from the outside to you, then all your game hosting will work just fine.

I recommend you go to a site like www.tomshardware.com or www.anandtech.com and read up from knowledgeable sources, not this hearsay.

And lastly, like I mentioned, if you don't mind paying the extra $30, get the Linksys wireless one I mentioned, if you do not want to use wireless then you can use the four ports on it, but you have wireless as an option.

Squick