Greetings all, I'm looking to set up a lan at my gf's place and I was wondering what would be the best way to procede (adv vs disadv). The set up is as follows. 5 pc's, 1 cable connection coming in (60kb up, 250kb down). The pc's are spread out across the house. I figure if they want all the pc's in their rooms, it'll be about 150 ft of cat5. Thus, My question is fairly simple, what is the best way to share the internet connection for cheap ? I was thinking of either buying a 5 port switch and 1 extra nic card, and hooking one maching with the i-net directly and sharing my inet connection with this pc while connecting all other pc's onto this switch. OR going wireless. It's in a safe neighbourhood so im not worried about security. What would be the cheapest/best way to go about it ? Thanks, Crynos

Your best solution is to buy a DSL/cable router and connect each computer to it. Most of them have a built-in 4 port switch. If you need more ports, you could also buy a separate switch or get a router with more ports. I have a Netgear FVS318 which is an 8 port VPN router with firewall. Wireless is more expensive and is slightly more difficult to setup. It is also subject to environmental interference. The other method of sharing which you referred to is called ICS. It is the cheapest but in my opinion is the worst method. It can be (and usually is) more difficult to configure and it requires that the host computer to be running to allow the other computers access to the Internt.

Allrighty, So basically I would have to buy the router, connect my cable modem directly to the router via cat5 , then connect every other pc to the router via cat5. Then I would have to set up each machine on the network and set up internet sharing ? that's it that's all ? Thanks, Crynos