Router recommendations(budget $120)

Keep the Linksys router and buy an additional access point. You will be able to get more for your money in terms of wireless performance if you don't need a built in router.

If you already have a wrt54g, I would recommend keeping it and buying an additional access point. If you do not already have one, then I would not recommend it since you have stated that you were dissatisfied with it's performance.

If you were not using it with *your* wireless card in *your* house, then it is not safe to form an opinion of it based on your previous experience. Wireless signals will pass through all walls differently, so signal strength going through walls at your friends house does not necessarily indicate how the same equipment would perform at your house.

What type of wireless card do you have? Do you know what chipset it uses? Chances are good that you could get better signal with the same router by upgrading your client card to one with better rx/tx sensitivities. This is often overlooked, and upgrading the card is sometimes cheaper than upgrading the router.

Go to Walmart or Best Buy and pick one out. Go home and test it out and exchange it if you don't like it. I would buy something higher end used off eBay, but most people on this board are adverse to the idea of spending more than $80-100 on a wireless AP.

Well personally, I'd buy a router and AP separately. The router won't affect your wireless performance at all, so any old Linksys router should work. As for the AP, you could look at Cisco's Aironet 340/350 series, they should be reasonably priced on eBay now since they're a few generations out of date. Proxim also makes really good APs.

If you buy a separate AP, then you will not be using the router for wireless, so the wireless features of the router are something of a moot point. Plug the AP in to one of the ports on the back of the router. I'm sure you can pick up a 4 port wired Linksys on eBay for under $20, I bought a Netgear wireless router on eBay for $18 including shipping.

That's the assumption I've been going by for everything I've said in this thread.

It comes down to simple economics really.

You want better wireless performance without spending excessively.

Since wireless is all an AP does, it will be cheaper to invest in a quality AP than a router with the same level of wireless performance. When you look at routers, you have the actual processor, plus a switch, plus an AP. A lot more components than an AP has, so it's cheaper to build a good AP than it is to build a good router.