Well Barman, two months and a day later I have finally come up with a solution. This was not a particularly pressing project on my part, but it sure made the DW happy.
I went down to my local IT repair shop, explained my situation, and the man there showed me a
Keebox w150nr wireless router.
Swapping out the old with the new router was painless, and I had it up and running in a half an hour. Both our Win 7, and XP machines recognized each other immediately without any additional setting changes on my part, and I was able to work with files in either direction.
Then the DW stepped in and was pleasantly surprised when she was able to complete the set-up on her eReader because there was no joy when she went over to her niece's, and tried to use her machine that had wireless built-in.
One area that I will need to be vigilant in now is Security.
For now it is broadcasting the router's model number as the Service Set Identifier (
SSID), and I have a pre-shared key as the pass-phrase, but I wonder if this is enough. Do you or any other members have experience concerning this, maybe a link with some good information on the subject of Wi-Fi security?
There are some Pros and Cons at
Newegg.com, but for what we need I believe we will be okay.