I have a home network with four PCs - two wired and two wireless. My router is a Linksys WRT54GL, flashed with Tomato 1.07. We live in what I consider to be a very safe neighborhood, but I still want to be able to secure my network, just in case. I noticed that even when running WEP 64-bit, the connection speed on the two wireless PCs (one Win 98 SE and one Win XP Home)drops dramatically. Of course, if I disable the security, the speed is fine. How much of a connection/surfing speed drop should I expect, and is there anything I can do to improve the speed? Also, I would like to run WPA-personal because it is more secure than WEP, but am I going to have a problem because one of the wireless PCs is running on Win 98? The wireless NIC in that PC is a Zonet ZEW1601 ... a little older, but it does supposedly support WPA. The wireless NIC in the Win XP Home PC is a TrendNet TEW-443PI ... newer, and it supports the newer WPA protocols. 1 Corinthians 15:3-4

There is going to be some overhead realized when you decide to add encryption to your network. Every packet that is sent and received from your wireless PC's has to be either encrypted or decrypted. What type of decline in speeds are you noticing? You will have to research and see if your wireless NIC's support WPA. Some older NIC's have firmware upgrades to bring them up to par in terms if security standards. Go to the manufacturer's website and see if your NIC's are able to be flashed with newer firmware.

It might take 30 seconds (or more) to load a page that prior to the use of encryption would only take a few seconds. This may be normal, but I find it hard to believe that it should take that much longer. Maybe I'm just impatient?! 1 Corinthians 15:3-4