And don't forget that perhaps the best thing you can do is be careful with the placement wireless base station. Ideally, it should be in the CENTER of the area you want wireless connectivity, which MIGHT NOT be where your cablemodem/DSL connection is in the house.
For example, if you put your base station in a room at the front of your house, then the signal is almost certainly going to be readable from the street. On the other hand, if you put it in a back room, then a driver on the street may not see it at all. BOTH locations will probably be just fine for use in and around the house.
Then there's the simple expedient of turning off the radio portion of an all-in-one wireless base station/DSL router when you aren't using the notebook, or in some cases, lowering the antennas to dramatically reduce the broadcast range. I myself prefer a seperate wireless base station AND router, so I can more easliy position the base station in the center of the house, AND I can unplug it when I just won't be using the wireless stuff for a few days/weeks.
Obviously, you reall should enable all the other stuff mentioned here, such as 128 bit wep, MAC address filtering, and changing the SSID and such.
When it comes to router brands, I like the Linksys products. Regardng compatibility, both the Warbirds Con and ther AH con used a off-the-shelf, consumer-grade linksys DSL router to spread around the connection to everyone on the Con floor for the past two years. They work just fine.
-Llama
