thick walls - hardwiring advice

[Marvin Martian]

Hi Guys, I live in old Victorian terraced house with thick walls & wireless 'coolspots' upstairs. My ISP supplied router (Virgin , Netgear) works fine wirelessly to the room immediately above the router but keeps dropping out in my son's room (diagonally upward & opposite side of the house - through two thick walls & a floor). I think it would be best if I run an ethernet cable up to his room. We have an old PC he would like to use and he wants his xbox moved there too.
So the question is - if I run one ethernet cable to his room, how do I connect it so both PC & xbox work at the same time with no loss of service? OR Is there a better way?
Any advice welcome.

[GoNz0]

all you do i connect it to a switch and the virgin router will take care of the rest

make sure its a 1gb switch, not 100mb

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...w=1358&bih=610

[Marvin Martian]

Thanks for your speedy reply. Will any gigabit switch do,
are there any features I should look out for?

[Fraz]

Pretty much any gigabit switch will do. We've got plenty of these at work, and I have one at home too. They work very well and look nice to boot:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/5-por...0-100-1000-gbe

It is possible to get ones that are much cheaper, and I'm sure they'll be fine too. I remember years ago buying a 10/100 switch from ebuyer for £5. Worked flawlessly for years, despite looking like something that you'd find in a Christmas cracker...

[dave87]

If you really don't fancy running a cable, there is always the option of HomePlugs?

I'd always advocate running Ethernet, but it is an awful lot of hassle to run just a single cable (in fact, running 2/4/8 isn't much more trouble, depending on how you are doing it.)