Before you give up on your present system. Many people rank on Linksys routers, myself included. When Cisco took them over, they very intentionally made the Linksys stuff soft and weaker so as to try and get folks to go to their pro stuff on the Cisco side. They did not think that folks might actually opt to go to a different brand all together, their stupid lose. My Linksys was nothing but trouble and at the time we were not writing to a common folder on the tower, just having one wired and two wireless machines using it for internet access and to get to the common printer. It still stunk.
I tried a D-Link next and used that with AC for awhile. Although better than the first router it still left much to be desired. Finally I got my NetGear Maxrange with the seven hunting for its clients internal aetennas and it has been great! If you should choose to get the Netgear consider switching to Trendmicro's PC clilin for internet security. The two companies have a bit of a relationship and the router can see the clients and their security status and it really seems to work very well together. Also Trendmicro seems to be one of the best packages out there right now. Updates ever 3-4 hours. I've heard that Karpinski might actually be the "best" but it is more expensive, at one license per box, but they really seem to know what they are doing. Updates every hour! I'm considering giving them a try.
Every now and again you do need to "re-boot" your network itself and the main machine. Do you turn all your computers off at night. As much as rebooting does the spike thing that most of us try to avoid, it is a known fact that if left running for days, the OS itself in the RAM can and does get weak, and less than perfect. A once a day re-boot (we just boot in the morning) tends to load a fresh clean copy of the OS onto all the machines and get them off to a good start. This is especially important for the main machine in the system.
Same for the modem and the router too. They are but chip based little things with a bit of software of their own too. Turn them off "Hard" unplugging if need be. Turn on the modem first and let it find itself. Mine has a numbe of status lights so I wait for the three or four lights to get back to normal, about a minute or so, seems longer. Then and only then, turn on or re-boot your router. It needs to be done in this sequence or the router won't find or know about it's modem. Never the other way around.
I find if one or two machines are having trouble it is a re-boot to that machine or client. If the tower itself (our main machine that we all share that famous folder on) is slow or wierd then I re-boot the tower and all the others afterwards just for good measure. If all clients are slow or weird but the tower is OK then it is probably the router that needs a reboot. I frequently find that thunderstorms (of course) bring on network weirdness.
I can not stress enough how much of a different my switch of routers made. We have two other 2.4 systems just across the parking lot on two different sides of us and we use a 2.4 phone system ourselves. Compared to anything else, this Netgear is head and shoulders above the rest, really.
Now as to the limit of clients allowed onto a windows XP system I have heard many different answers including that perhaps there really is no limit on the number of clients in an Pro enviornment. I tried to research this on the MS website and other places because of eventually running into the same concerns at some point in the future. I'm just wondering if the number of clients isn't as important as the actual number of clients reading and writing to the system at any given time. So unless 11 or more clients are all retrieving or sending data thru the network and only to the actual shared material or resources, would it really matter? I'd be interested in a firm, chapter and verse answer to all of this. And agian I would be suspect of the Linksys router if only a client or two are having issues at any given time. Perhaps the router is having trouble dealing with the traffic, not the server of the peers.
I gather your router and network are locked down good and tight? Don't want any freeloaders riding your network and reducing its performance no less perhaps getting a peek at our patients PHI. I caught some bozo sitting in a pickup truck one night outside one of the other offices riding their wireless router after hours. And their network was set up by the clowns who set up my second router too. "oh our network guys setup our system well". Yeah right. Now I know better. If in doubt, buy the dummy's book. Now my network is possibly one of the tightest in all of CNY. Gurus my tush.
On the same idea, what is the word from AC central about re-doing AC in some sort of a SQL Server form and how might that effect us folks who are using p2p set-ups. Will we all eventually need to switch over to a server based enviornment? This is the type of advanced warning and advice I wish we would be getting from the mothership so we users out here in the field can make intelligent plans based on good solid advanced planning.
Anyway, be well.
Paul
