Switching from dial-up to high-speed. HELP!!!

First off let's start with picturing your internet connection as a pipe with water in it.

Dialup is like trying to drink a river through a small straw.

Broadband solutions like DSL or cable are like having a big faucet. In short, cable is a wholee order of "ZOMG" faster.

Wireless (such as mobile broadband) is nice if you have a roaming notebook computer but is about useless for a desktop system.

For home subscriber service, wireless is just a way to avoid a whole lot of Cat5 or coax cable all over the place; it is not an ISP connecion method for a home desktop (and before someone argues the point, yes, if you wanted to waste the money, you COULD do it, but it's about as useful as a kickstand on a porpise).

Short form of this: If all you have is cable or DSL, go with that. If you have FIOS, get that. FIOS is to cable what cable is to dialup.

Hope that this helps!

Just to add to the very good explanation that xandraius suggested, I have used both ADSL (phone highspeed) and cable ISP.

I found the cable to be superior to ADSL.

You would have to acquire a modem to connect to the ISP. This modem can be wired and work as a wireless connection at the same time.

In other words, you could connect to the cable moden with a cat5-6 cable from the desktop, and also connect to the wireless portion of the modem from another desktop or laptop in the house that has wireless capability, or somewhat close by the wireless modem.

The speeds and distances vary and for optimal performance of the wireless connection.

It is recommended that a "G" rated modem is the minimum and the "N" rated modem is preferred.

Of course the "N" rated wireless modems are more expensive, but also more desireable.

Setting up a wireless modem can be a slight hassle, but can be done with a little instruction and information.

You would also want to encrypt the signal to prevent any unauthorized use from outside sources (systems).

This may sound a little confusing and hard to do but it really is not.

Just a little reading from the documation that comes with each modem can walk you right through it and you will be up and on the Internet via a wired and wireless connection in no time.

Hope this helps.

I would recommend Linksys products. You can find information on them at www.linksys.com.  You can also go to www.newegg.com and look up routers. You can read customer reviews on routers that might help you decide on what you would prefer to buy.

Thanks for the responses guys. So in short, cable internet is the way to go, but FiOS is best if it is available, correct?

So wireless is only recommended if you have several laptops in the house?

Wireless is nice if you want to be able to move around, or you have a system that is in a place inconvenient for running network cable.  Using a wire is actually better for transferring data since, at least internally on your network, it will usually be faster than wireless (depending on the flavor of wireless and the EM environment in your area).  As usual, what works best is going to be based on what you are trying to do.