You most likely do have an adapter already unless the Dell is really really old. To confirm look at the back of your tower. You should see a normal telephone hookup socket (the one used for a dial up connection) and a somewhat larger but very similar looking socket. This is probably a bit removed from the dial up port. Your cable modem is likely connected here. (It might be connected to a USB port but lets hope not.) If you plan to connect to the router via Ethernet cable instead of wireless, you will not see any benefit from the Speedbooster circuitry in the router. If connecting wireless be sure to purchase a LinkSys Speedbooster wireless adapter if you want the benefits of the Speedbooster circuitry. Open the box. Unfold and read the installation instructions. Keep them handy to follow along with. Remove the disk from box. Insert disk in drive. Follow the prompts. Remember: 1. change password to the router. 2. if not connecting wireless disable wireless access. 3. if connecting wireless enable security/encryption and use WPA or WPA-2. WEP is worthless. 4. if connecting wireless, use an encryption passkey at least 16 characters long. Longer than 20 is wasted unless you using a weak string of characters. 5. Do not confuse the router passWORD with the encryption passKEY. 6. A good passkey will look like this: a7Q*f%2Br@%9UxT# 802.11n is faster and has a longer range than 802.11a/b/g. As long as you are in your house and your primary need for speed is uploading to and downloading from the internet and the wireless router speed is faster than your upload and download speeds then you are OK. A modest cable modem connection will allow about 3Mbps download and 256Kbps upload speeds peak. Faster and slower speeds are available from most cable companies. Please note: Those speeds are in bits not bytes. To convert to bytes divide by 8. The samples above would be about 375KBps and 32KBps. Don cristy wrote: > Hi, > > I just purchased a Wireless-G Broadband Router with SpeedBooster (Linksys). > I forgot how I found out but I think I already have the adapter I need > (would like to double check though, how do I do this?) I have a desktop > (Dell) and cable/modem (Cox) The desktop is hooked up to cable/modem. Is > it hard for me to set this up ? Also, what is the big speed difference > between this one and the "N", is it really noticeable? What does it mean? > I know with dialup speed is very low and with able much higher, is this what > it refers to? > > thanks, > christy --------------------------------------------------------------- Please remember to trim your replies (including this sentence and everything below it) and adjust the subject line as necessary. To subscribe, unsubscribe or modify your email settings: //www.freelists.org/webpage/pctechtalk OR To subscribe to the mailing list, send an email to pctechtalk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "subscribe" in the Subject. To unsubscribe send email to pctechtalk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe" in the Subject. To access our Archives: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PCTechTalk/messages/ //www.freelists.org/archives/pctechtalk/ To contact only the PCTT Mod Squad, write to: pctechtalk-moderators@xxxxxxxxxxxxx To join our separate PCTableTalk off-topic group, send a blank email to: pctabletalk+subscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---------------------------------------------------------------