[nsjong]

I say this is urgent cause my bloody sister won't stop stealing the internet!
And the router is SO OLD (4 years) that whenever she takes the connection, it literally takes half of my connection. Thus, I keep signing off of MSN, every 5 minutes, pages won't even come close to loading, etc.

I need a good recommendation from a few of you who know a lot about computers because I don't have much of a clue on which router to buy.

She has a wireless one to steal from my linksys 2.4GHz piece of crap.

Any opinions or fixes or whatever WILL help.

I bid you all a nice evening. =)

 

[lan]

Is she running something all the time and takes up all the bandwidth? It's usually very hard to slow a router down unless you're making many connections like with those file sharing programs. Some routers can't handle many connections at once. I would also take a look and see if she is running such a program and check if it's upload is set to max. Things really slowdown also if upload bandwidth is being maxxed. I would configure that program to limit upload speed then.

As for router. Which model do you have? There are sometimes 3rd party Linksys firmwares which can perform under load better or shape the traffic.

 

[Wodgy]

It sounds from your description (the age, the 2.4GHz sticker) like you have the Linksys WRT54, which is a very popular router. It's not "SO OLD", in fact it's still sold, and was still a current product up until about a year ago when pre-802.11N rolled around.

There's nothing wrong with the WRT54. It's a configuration issue. The first thing I'd do is go to the Linksys support site and download the most recent official firmware, then update the router. This alone may solve your problems. The next thing I'd do is use the web interface to the router to reset it to factory settings. You should also scan your sister's computer for spyware, because if her machine is part of a botnet, it could be sucking up a lot of bandwidth.

 

[nsjong]

Nope. This piece crap is old.
Hell, the firmware on the site was last updated in 2005 for this model.

 

[CTY]

So would you mind telling us the model number of your router?

At least the Linksys ones with enough memory can run a linux firmware. With this, you can either shape the traffic or/and prevent your sister from using file sharing applications.