Dan,

There was no need for an earlier reply as you provided all the information in your previous post. I just had to understand what I was reading and that took a while. After numerous errors (mine), I finally understood what I was supposed to be doing and in retrospect it's easy. A five minute job.

It definitely works. I found a spot outside the house, behind a brick wall, where I couldn't see the signal from my WAG54G, primary router. I positioned the WRT54GS in the bathroom with a view of the laptop and the laptop received a good to excellent signal from that router and connected to the internet.

We don't have reception problems even though there are a few potentially difficult areas. For the signal to reach my son's room it has to travel through the edge of a concrete slab, a double brick wall and a plaster wall. So he doesn't see a maximum signal but it's quite satisfactory. It was interesting that having the WRT54GS next to his computer gave him a stronger signal than the signal from the primary router.

My front door is 20 metres from the primary router. I can get a signal on my laptop 30 metres beyond the front door. So 50 metres with several plaster walls in between. When I positioned the WRT54GS near the front door I got a signal 40 metres beyond the front door. A small increase in range but I see the ability to send signals around obstructions to be the main benefit.

I'm a wiser man.

Dan and John,

I meant to ask, what SSID do you use on your WRT-54G repeater? The same as the primary wireless router or a different one. When I did my tests I was using a different SSID on my repeater so that I could tell that the system was working. But I recall I had problems transferring files between computers that were receiving different SSIDs.

"what SSID do you use on your WRT-54G repeater?"

I set it up as per this dd-wrt link.  As in the diagram, two SSIDs are used--a matching SSID in "basic wireless" and a different SSID in "virtual interfaces".