Wireless Newbie Help, Please!

[Theo]

Hello, I'm having a spot of bother finding what I need, so any help/advice is greatly appreciated. I have a lovely, tidy wired network over two floors in my house. Wires are all routed nicely under carpets (completely unnoticable). I have a total of around 6/7 pcs networked up over these two floors.

However, there is one PC that isn't networked, and it's getting to the stage where it needs to be. The PC in my lounge is used to play my backed up dvds, at 2GB per DVD - my 20GB hdd keeps running out of space, so I have to keep bringing back upstairs to the network here, take stuff off, put stuff on. Very tedious, and it's not doing my back any good.

Routing a cable is pretty much a no-go. I don't fancy drilling through the floor/ceiling, and routing under the carpets would be impossible.

So I think I'll need a very basic wireless system, please chaps. Just something that can connect my file server to my media pc. The signal has to travel about 15-20 metres through a couple of walls and a floor. One wall is brick, the others are thin kinda plasterboard thing.

I'm not after any state of the art stuff, just something that can stream the media smoothly.. I'm not sure whether a budget of £50 would be sufficient, or not, but anything as far below that as possible and I'll love you forever.

Thanks,
Theo.

[Theo]

What would be better for me? Bluetooth? PCI cards? Access points?

[Zathras]

Bluetooth will definitely be insufficient over that range. I'd go for two 802.11b PCI cards to start off with. Look for ones with a decent external aerial. You'll have to shop around to get two cards for £50 though.

[Paul Adams]

Bluetooth is for connecting devices to PCs, not networking PCs, I thought?
Either way, its bandwidth is only 720kbps and very short range, so not much use.

Belkin 802.11b PCI cards seem to be around £23 inclusive, or Aria have a real cheapy one at under £18 inc. - http://www.aria.co.uk/ProductInfoComm.asp?ID=8223

Not sure if I'd stream the media in real time, or just use it to copy the movie beforehand, though - and a bigger hard disk might be a great investment as an alternative

Tricky thing to gauge is what your signal strength is going to be like, and I hope you don't get the problem of having drop and reconnect constantly (I've seen this on a couple of WLANs, and it's not interference necessarily).

[Zathras]

One can definitely network PCs with Bluetooth, but it certainly isn't designed for this purpose. One of the regulars (Deckard?) used Bluetooth to network two PCs but found it fraught with problems. WLAN is the way to go.

[jsterling]

although it puches the price up it would be better to get wireless g or super g stuff as you could stream dvds from your main pc. Using a laptop with wireless @ the mo and the only thing it had trouble with was a tv prog i recorded in v high quality (20min/gb).

[Theo]

Thanks chaps, I'm still in two minds as to whether it's worth the money/bother yet, but you've all helped muchly.