Originally Posted By: PandaBear
Personal recommendation if you are going to pay for one anyways:
buy a good router with open source firmware support that has good range, and flash the firmware to use it as an "client" or receiver. router usually have much stronger signal and you can place it far away, as high as you want to get better reception.
a good router can go as far as a house away, and i share internet with my neighbor (split internet bill) using this approach.
Yep. Buy a router that you can put Tomato on and crank up the power. Tomato allows you to crank up the transmit power significantly. Though you don't want to crank up the power too much because once you reach a certain threshold, higher power starts to degrade the signal and you get packet loss etc. Default in Tomato is 10mW (or 15?) can't remember right now. If you try pushing the transmit power up in increments of 2mW until you get a good strong signal to your desktop.
You shouldn't have to worry much about the signal from your desktop reaching the router since they have much better receiving antennas than what is built into the USB dongle.
I've been using one of these
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833162134 for a about 4 years now.
Buffalo makes some great consumer products grade products that blow away Linksys and D-link. My old one is not a N or "draft-N" router but it does have an internal amp for both the transmitter as well as receiver.
My house is a 2 story stucco Tudor from the 1920s. The external walls are about 10 inches thick (1" thick sheetrock with a skim coat, 8" of insulation space, 2" of stucco). The router has no problem broadcasting a strong signal to my garage which is 30ft away from the house.