Router or Switch?

In our house we have internet through Earthlink and Time Warner cable service. We have a cable modem hooked up to a wireless router that also has four RJ-45 ethernet ports. The wireless works fine through most of the first and second floors of the house, but doesn't give reliable service in the basement where I've set up my work area. The basement has 10-foot ceiling (unusual for a basement) and lots of overhead iron pipes for the hot water heating system, which may explain the bad wireless signal in the basement.

So, I ran a cat5 cable down the laundry chute and over to my desk and the computer works fine with the internet now, but I can't use my color laserprinter, monochrome laserprinter, or other computer with the network.
Whenever I want to print, I have to unhook from the internet and hook up an ethernet patch cable from the computer to the printer I want to use. So I cant print while I'm downloading or surfing. It's a pain in the tush.

To have everything networked together all the time (in the basement) should I connect my incoming cable (from the router upstairs) to an ethernet SWITCH on my desk and then run patch cables to my printers and scanner?

Or do I need to get another ROUTER for my desk?

I'm using (at various times) 2 Mac Minis, a MacBook, and an iMac all using OS X 10.6.8
An H-P color laserprinter, a Brother black and white laserprinter, a Canon scanner.

Thanks for the help.

 

Putting a router on your desk will break your network.

The router your ISP sent you hands out local IP addresses using a service called Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). I'll spare you the technical details (the Wikipedia article is a good place to start if you really want to know, but it might be a bit advanced if you don't have a networking background) but the important thing to know is that DHCP hands out local addresses (usually in the 192.168.x.x range, which is one of three IP ranges reserved for the purpose) using broadcast traffic. Broadcast traffic is unique because it gets delivered to every host on your network instead of just the one that's specified in the address. This is necessary since before DHCP does it's thing the computer that needs an address obviously doesn't have one. Putting more than one DHCP server on your network without careful planning is bad mojo. There are some configurations where you would want more than one DHCP server, but that type of complexity is rarely seen in a home network, and it's the sort of thing that's best left to the pros. Far more common in a case like yours is that the duplicate servers will confuse each other and the client devices, break the IP address leases, and everything will come crashing down. So don't do that.

Whatchoo need, as Lucifer said, is a simple unmanaged switch. They're cheap, and they'll work. Plug in the cable from your router to one port, and then plug in the cables to downstream devices into the others; the order doesn't matter in the slightest. Based on your description an 8 port will do as long as you don't plan on adding any more devices at that location (7 devices, plus one port for the upstream connection); if you want expandability you can get a 16 port, but be aware that the price tag on those is significantly higher. Switches can be daisy-chained, but it's not a clean network setup, and doing stuff like that can complicate troubleshooting down the road -- best to just keep it to one switch on each port downstream of the router if possible (not counting the router's internal switch, naturally).

I have a strong preference for Linksys devices, because I've owned a lot of them and never been dissatisfied, which is something that I can't say for some other brands of consumer-grade networking gear. Linksys got bought out by Cisco a while back, and Cisco, as you may or may not know, is the brand that basically powers the internet. A huge majority of enterprise and carrier-grade networking gear comes from Cisco, with their only major competitor in that space being Juniper (who doesn't make consumer-grade hardware). Newegg will sell you a Linksys 8 port gigabit switch for $54:

Newegg.com - LINKSYS SE2800 10/100/1000Mbps Gigabit Ethernet Switch

If you're looking for a lower cost option, a reasonable budget brand is TP-Link. Their stuff is significantly cheaper, and doesn't suck. Here's an 8 port TP-Link switch for $27:

Newegg.com - TP-LINK TL-SG1008D Unmanaged 10/100/1000Mbps Unmanaged Gigabit Desktop Switch

Those are both sale prices, likely for the holiday season. Get em while they're hot.

I've had too many D-Link switches fail on me under mysterious circumstances to be comfortable recommending them. ASUS is also a brand worth looking at -- I have honestly never met an ASUS device of any description I haven't liked. Apart from that, I don't really know enough of the different brands in the consumer market to comment on them, so I'll leave it off there. That ought to be enough to get you on your way at least.

 

I KNOW that I DON'T KNOW much, which is why I asked here. Thanks for all the helpful advice.
I just like to know what to plug in where. I really enjoy using my computers. The less that dealing with the various devices intrudes upon the use of the apps and data, the happier I am. That is why I use Mac OS instead of Eunuchs.

Lindy