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.

Ah, thank you.

Having spent many hours trawling through discussion boards, looking for solutions to non-connectivity for WiFi, am now up & running! One last hurdle was that my laptop was unable to assign an IP address and continually showed 0.0.0.0 It appears the solution to this is to disable the Windows Firewall and this did allow the laptop to acquire the host address. But this means permanently disabling the Windows Firewall. My Netgear router has a built-in Firewall, so presumably this will do the job? Two would be better??? Does anyone know if this really matters, please?

Routers normally have a firewall which protects against incoming attacks. In a setup with a router, all any personal firewall software will really do is block any unauthorised outgoing communication. For example, if the av software misses a trojan, your first warning might be some unknown program asking for access to the internet.

Really I don't know why the laptop is unable to acquire an IP address - as long as there's no connectivity issue. Normally the windows default TCP/IP settings will work, and it will automatically acquire an IP address from the router. How it works is the router has a DHCP (dynamic host configuration protocol) server on it which is responsible for assigning IP addresses to any devices that connect to it. Windows firewall has never caused any issue with this for me. You can force Windows to acquire a new IP address by using the terminal commands IPCONFIG /RELEASE then IPCONFIG /RENEW. Use IPCONFIG /ALL to confirm that it's successfully got an IP address.

I used to use Zone Alarm freefirewall software,but it was slowing down my PC. I have switched to Comodo firewall - also free and much, much faster.

Comodo Personal Firewall