Networks Router: Bandwidth Limiting, Wireless?

Looking for recommendations for a good bandwidth managing router that has 10/100/1000 speeds (not TOTALLY necessary but nice for the odd large xfer) and wireless (necessary). My brother lags me to death when I'm playing games and he's transferring stuff from my computer as my athlon 2500 cpu chokes from it during a game. Internet speed generally takes a hit too. I have software installed on his computer for control but he doesn't always run it like I tell him to.

Thanks.

 

Get a router that can work with dd-wrt or Tomato? I think that should have the features you want.

 

The classic WRT-54G is always a good candidate for DD-WRT, which enables prioritization and throttling and such. There are very few routers, last I checked, that have gigabit lan - a couple of the pricy N ones, but very few if any of those support the custom firmwares. Having said that, my limited experience with the bandwidth shaping in a DD-WRT didn't seem to do a damn thing, but there are too many options in there for me to rule out simply having set it up wrong. Obviously you'll need to secure the router so he doesn't go and just reset the settings though.

FWIW though, the solution is on your box - dump the simple file sharing and just enable bandwidth quotas on the network shares. I'm pretty sure you can limit access times as well (so you can disable the shares between, say 6-8pm when you're gaming), not to mention password-protecting stuff.

 

Like those above me stated. The big problem is your box, and from your description it sounds like your processor more than anything. My suggestion would be to build a cheep fileserver for your files, you can probably even find something for free if you look hard enough at what corporations throw away. Something 2GHz and better, put it up to 1GB of ram (which you can probably get for free too, again if you look hard enough) and then buy a 1TB drive, a gigabit LAN card, and maybe a fancy case so it doesn't stick out (if its got a crappy case).

If you're positive its the router, I would go with something like the Linksys WRVS4400N which has QOS, Wireless N and Gigabit, or to save a few bucks, find an old WRT54G (when they still had decent memory for DD-WRT), load DD-WRT, and attach it to a Gigabit switch. Your internet connection isn't likely to be over 15Mbps, in comparison to 100Mbps router throughput, so you won't loose any performance, and the files will still go Gigabit to Gigabit.