I asked Tony if he knew anything about a good broadband sharing router to buy. Now I’m a two PC household again, no way was I going back to using Internet Connection Sharing. Okay, so it works, but it’s fiddly, your main PC has to be on to use the second one, and getting the firewall (ZoneAlarm Pro) to work with it was a buncha hassle.

Tony said get a LinkSys WRT54G Wireless-G Broadband Router. So I did. Well okay, I read up on it a bit first to verify it was what I wanted, and then I got it. Widely available in AU for about A$130.

I don’t actually need wireless at the moment, but may at some stage, so I can turn it on then. It was surpisingly easy to do the basic setup… I’m betting there’ll be more hassles though when I try to get the work extranet software and BitTorrent running with its firewall (and the XP SP2 firewall), as well as enabling file and print sharing between the two PCs.

(Here’s one page about BitTorrent and firewalls, and ooh lookie, a shiny new page that uses the same model router as I just got as its example!)

Next step is to load up the new PC with all its software, and move my files over. I doubt I’ll write about it here unless something spectacularly bad or amusing happens though.