I agree with Mike. You can't tell in advance how far a particular router will reach. It just depends on placement and what kinds of materials it has to go through. I had a router in an upstairs closet that I could get a good signal from when I was 150' away in my greenhouse, but it couldn't reach another location in my house that was about 40' away. I routinely detect wireless signals from my neighbors who are hundreds of feet away. You will probably have your best chance of success with an N-type router, like the one you have. One other thing: If you have an existing computer that already has a wireless card in it, see if it connects up to your new router without putting in a new card. Many routers are "backwards-compatible" and will work just fine with older cards. My new N-router does precisely that with my computers (which range in age from 9 years old to less than a year old).

try a full power down of everything I do mean everything. Power off the computers, the router, the modem etc. leave all power off for 5 mins or so, then power up in this order, power to modem only let it get fully lit up, then power on to router, let it get fully lit up, then power up your computers letting each get fully loaded. Then try to connect to your wireless, I assume you have put in your wireless network passphrase for the laptops that are trying to access the wifi network.

well, you need to access the linksys router and look in its wifi pages might try ; http://192.168.1.1 or http://192.168.1.254 or maybe change the .1. to .0.

zep et. al.: Sorry I didn't get back sooner but with my limited experience, I was a little leary of doing the uninstall of network adapter. However I finally realized that at worst it would only mess up the laptop and not the other devices that are connected and working on the secured network. So: I just uninstalled and rebooted. The adapter did reinstall but I am still not getting a proper connection although things have slightly changed. The secured network got connected, but did not even ask for the security password and simply went to 'validating identity' and simply hung. It didn't even time out. I checked firefox to see if it was expecting a password there, as was the initial case to get connected to the Guest Network (where I am again now), but it couldn't find the server. You may recall, that previously the issue was that the secured net would ask for the password, but find it unacceptable and give 'limited or no connectivity. Is there a way to force the network to ask for the password?? Any other ideas? Eventually, I will probably find a way to get a knowledgeable person out to my house where they could diagnose this. FYI, I am creating another post about security updates that may tangentially be connected to this thread. I apparently successfully installed sp3 but 'security update' keeps wanting to install it AGAIN! I was worried I might not be able to shut down to reload the adapter, but I was able to cancel the update.