I've been having this problem for years, and have gone through like 5 different routers and various wireless cards. I am constantly having dropouts with my wireless and have to constantly reconnect, and even when connected it can still be pretty slow.

Right now I have a Trendnet something N router and an N card. It had been working pretty well until around a week ago, I have no idea why it would suddenly start being so terrible again. My computer a floor above the router and pretty far, but I have problems with the laptop one room away from the router as well. What the hell can I do, other than getting ethernet wired through the house (which would be really expensive in my house)?

I'd avoid trendnet at all costs, their stuff is absolute garbage. When it was working, was the signal strength lower than you'd expect?

One other possible solution you might want to try is something like this.

What router would you recommend then? It's tricky, since nobody really agrees on networking stuff and everyone hates a different brand.

I've thought about the powerline stuff but it's just too inconvenient, especially with laptops.

For wireless cards, honestly I think the best are the built in intel wireless nics that many laptops come with these days. For routers, I've had better luck with linksys and netgear stuff than I have with others.

Another option I didn't think of before was to use a wired router and then just get a seperate wireless access point (some wireless routers can run in access point mode only).