My main workshop is not connected to my house… and I don’t want to string a network cable to it, so my best option is to go WiFi.

Now, since I often work on multiple PCs at the same time, as well as running the main workshop PC… I find I need to have easy internet access from the workshop.

This normally means plugging a customer PC into an ethernet router, and then using the internet almost straight away.

If I use WiFi I need to use a USB WiFi adapter, and install the drivers for it, before I can access the internet.

But with some PCs, this is just not an option… infections and hardware failures can make something as simple as installing a driver an ordeal that can take hours.

But there are a few solutions available.

One solution is called WDS. But WDS seems to have many problems with WPA encryption (which I strongly recommend to anyone using WiFi)… as well as many cases where the throughput speed is halved… It just seems prone to problems, unless I just want to use it as a WiFi repeater (but I want to do much more)

So, my solution is to use a WiFi access point in “client” mode.

What this means, is that the router “pretends” to be a WiFi client (like a laptop or a WiFi-enabled PC). Once you plug a PC into the WiFi router (via ethernet cable), then the PC can access the internet, as if I had plugged it directly into the router in my house.

The only disadvantage, is that if I plug in multiple PCs into the client “router”, then they all share the bandwidth (which, in my case, is unlikely, as 2 or 3 PCs won’t be doing major file transfers at the same time)

Until quite recently, I was using a Netgear access point, connected to a linksys WiFi router (which had faulty WiFi… so I disabled it). From the Linksys, I could connect up to 3 PCs.

A few months ago, the Netgear access point broke down, so I started a search for an inexpensive WiFi router that could work the way I wanted it.

And thats the subject of my next post. 🙂