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Question from Brittney: I hope you can help me Rick. I read your blog every day and I really trust your advice.
A couple of my friends and I just rented an apartment together, and so far it’s working out ok (fingers crossed on that lol).
We had Xfinity cable and Internet installed and they placed the modem/router combo box in the living room beside the TV.
Since I can’t run a cable from the living room to my bedroom, I need to connect my Dell desktop computer to the Internet over the WiFi network. How can I do that?
The problem is this is an older computer and it doesn’t have WiFi built in.
In your opinion, what’s the best way to connect the desktop PC to our router over WiFi?
I need a solution that’s as cheap as possible, but still works good. I know that’s a lot to ask for lol.
Rick’s answer: Brittney, as luck would have it there is a very inexpensive and effective solution to your problem.
All you need to do is buy an inexpensive USB WiFi Adapter and simply plug it into an open USB port on your PC.
There are tons of them to choose from on Amazon or at most any local electronics retailer, and they don’t cost much at all.
In fact, as of this writing you can pick one up for as little as $10. You’ll be hard-pressed to get by much cheaper than that!
There are a couple of other options for connecting your PC to your Wi-Fi network, but since you asked for the cheapest way possible I won’t go into them in this post.
Important: If your computer has one I strongly recommend plugging your USB WiFi adapter into a USB 3.0 or 3.1 port to take advantage of that awesome speed advantage.
I hope this helps, Brittney. Good luck!