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I'm fairly sold on the 314 - it's been flawless so far (4weeks).
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I had two experiences with Linksys tech support. The first one was very good. When I was connecting for the first time, it turned out I needed some special router settings for my cable provider. I got through to someone who knew what he was doing, and he quickly diagnosed the problem and told me how to correct. I was VERY impressed.
The second experience wasn't so good. My internet connection failed, and after determining I still had internet connectivity without the router I called Linksys support. The wait times were horribly long, and first level tech support seemed to be following a script that required frequent sequential reboots of everything (modem, router, PC). I spent hours trying to troubleshoot this unsuccessfully. Every call to tech support seemed to take 1 hour or more, and resulted in no progress. It was difficult to escalate to a higher level tech.
Then I got lucky. I've got a top-notch wireless guy working for me (what are the odds, right?), and I dragged him home. He spent another hour or two working on it, much of it talking to doofuses at Linksys. They still wanted to keep rebooting everything and tinkering with settings. He finally concluded that the uplink port on the router had died, and convinced them to give me a replacement. Fortunately, the unit was still under warranty.
The RMA part was actually painless - with a credit card number as security, they cross-shipped a new one before they got my old one back. The new one worked fine - even with my limited skills I was able to set it up in a few minutes.
So, to summarize: I like the performance of the equipment, and it's pretty easy to work with under normal circumstances. If you run into a problem, though, be prepared to spend some time on it. Overall, if I were shopping now, I'd do the same thing over again.
You might check the new Microsoft stuff out - I don't know anything about it, but I just saw an ad for it.
For residential use, I think wireless is the only way to go... My second PC is on a cart, and can roll anywhere that has an electrical outlook. Laptops, of course, are completely mobile.
Let us know what you end up using.
I have xbox connected directly to the router and that works flawlessly too.
You may have heard about "wall marking" :-) - marking invisible to the eye open nodes in wireless networks - are you going to write your own to indicate where wireless hackers can sit on the pavement outside with their laptops :-) or are you confident in your security measures?
The standard security advice I've heard is to:
1. Enable 128 bit Wired Equivalnet Privacy (WEP)
2. Filter access by MAC address
3. Disable SSID broadcast
If you do the basics for security your network will not be attractive to the wardriving crowd. They're looking for the unsecured access points, the ones that leave the default settings. If you encrypt your connection it's not impossible to break, but makes you much less of a target.
