Sorry Harry, had to go out hence late reply. No I haven't tried the plugs but have been considering them as I've been told they work well. I didn't know there was controversy around them TBH.

I'm in a newer house and using a Wifi router (a Linksys Wireless N ADSL router) but have been having trouble with wifi deadspots. Basically, connection in other rooms can go from excellent to terrible, in some cases just by moving the laptop a few inches. Sometimes it gets very 'flaky' for no apparent reason and changing the wireless channel (frequency) seems to improve it at times. It's a pain TBH hence looking at the plugs.

It may be worth your while taking a look at this site:- http://www.devolo.co.uk/#

I use 3 adapters (200 Mbps) and have no problems, they are brilliant.

From the FAQ section on the Devolo site is this :-

"Does dLAN interfere with amateur radio or broadcast radio reception?"

The answer is No. dLAN adapters transmit data in the frequency band from 2-30 MHz with an extremely low signal strength, amateur radio frequencies in this range are not used by the dLAN adapters.

Mine are 200 mbps Develos too. They are also brilliant and are also about 5-6yrs old. No problems with radio interference either.

Couldn't manage without mine. The adapters that is of course!

Thanks all for the info. Lots to think about & a quick glance at the devolo site looks interesting. With the WiFi router option it looks like it is just a case of buying the product & hoping for a decent reception all over the house, which I am pretty sure is going to be hit & miss. But the mains socket option still needs a modem router ayway, so might try the WiFi option (as currently only have a single port router) and then add the socket option if necessary.

Thanks also for the link on the Devolo plugs. This 200 mbps Zyxel kit looks a reasonable deal too. As far as I know you could just add them to any wireless router setup as long as the router has a spare Ethernet port.

Jon, yes that is correct.

FWIW I've bought a sony vaio with an i3 processor. Spent the day transfering stuff, installing software etc. Office 2003 went on without a hitch as did my even older quicken accounts package. No notable problems so far. I've ignored the free microsoft security essentials and uninstalled the supplied macafee in favour or a reinstall of my avg. Not quite so sure about the win 7 backup though. That looks good enough to me??
Thanks for the advice I received.

Decided to treat my PC to a memory upgrade (4Gb to 12Gb). Don't really need it but at 30 for 8Gb of DDR3-1600 figured it might come in useful at some point :) Also ordered some of the Zyxel 200mbps powerline adapters at the same time.

Win7 backup seems to work OK to me but it uses up a lot of disk space.

jonuk, with RAM upgrades, the limit seems to be what the motherboard will recognise, so presumably 12gb is max for your motherboard? (also I assume Win 7 needs this kind of memory now?) [I remember when 256mb of RAM was considered to be top of the range!!!]

Harry yes it depends on the motherboard. On mine there's four slots - and already have 2 x 2Gb, so the 2 x 4Gb modules I just ordered will fill it. It could take 16Gb - if I discarded the old memory.

Really Windows 7 doesn't *need* that kind of memory, it was more a case of it being the right price. It runs perfectly well in 2Gb for most purposes, although I do use some apps that need a lot of memory so 4Gb is better. Only 64 bit OS's can address anything over 4Gb (32 bit versions will just not see the higher memory). When I bought my 4 Gb (last year some time) I paid roughly 4 x as much per gigabyte.

[My first PC was a 486 with 4Mb and cost a small fortune!!]

You boys - 386 @25mhz - 1mb. @1989/90 and it cost 1200 from memory (no pun intended).

Best machine I had was a 486 dx4 100 with 16mb - in its day the dogs doodars.

Back in the 80s, we ran a factoring application (banking) on a Unix-based Ingres DB. That system had 16 MB of RAM and was considered great!

Its nice to go down 'Memory lane' :o)

I used to use an abacus

Back to the powerline plugs, if I may.

From the FAQ section on the Devolo site is this :-

"Does dLAN interfere with amateur radio or broadcast radio reception?"

The answer is No. dLAN adapters transmit data in the frequency band from 2-30 MHz with an extremely low signal strength, amateur radio frequencies in this range are not used by the dLAN adapters.

The bit I'm having difficulty with is that all the amateur HF allocations lie in the range 2-30MHz. I'm not sure exactly how they avoid them. Perhaps they should be more specific about the frequencies and bandwidth that they actually use, rather than specifying most of the HF spectrum. There is also the minor matter of all the other users of that spectrum, such as short-wave broadcast radio. Do they avoid all of that too?

Just seen there is a coaxial cable option on the market (MoCA from Netgear) which seem to offer the same as powerline networking, but via coaxial. Endless, confusing options!!!

What is the purpose of multiple WiFi ports on a router? I understand there are multiple LAN ports, but not sure why you would need four (in this case) WiFi ports which can each be configured for encryption, band etc.

Multiple users in an organisation but with differing levels of access to data? Or maybe just neighbours who keep turning off their wireless :-)

Multiple WiFi access points give the ability to give 'guest' access to your broadband without exposing computers on your internal network to your guests. It also means you can use a different password for guests to the one you use for your private network.