tomsliwowski

Smallnetbuilder tested the Nighthawk and the AC68U and they both performed almost identically. Get whichever one you can afford (I got a Nighthawk recently for $120 after rebates). Arguing which is better is like comparing 2 sects of Christianity, you'll have 2 sides with each believing theirs is the best.

When I had FIOS I used MoCA to hook up a wired PC in the basement to the router on the 2nd floor. I used a spare Actiontec MI424 router that I had from my previous house with all the routing features turned off. It worked fine for web browsing and transferring data to/from my server. I've since gotten rid of the PC and do everything over the 5GHz 802.11n or 802.11ac spectrum. 
 
If you don't want to bother with wireless then this is a viable solution. You can also try doing the Powerline thing but depending on your wiring it may not work that well. Keep in mind MoCA and Powerline can have somewhat weird issues but in my experience the MoCA ones were far more straightforward to figure out and fix.

1) Is correct
2) Is complete bullshit. The whole point of using a switch instead of a dumb hub is that packets don't get broadcast to everyone. The switch is aware of what is plugged into it and therefore if you have a NAS and some PCs connected to the switch, packets sent to/from them never touch the router or anything else outside the switch.
 
Gigabit technology has been common for at least 5+ years (I got a $20 D-Link green 5 port switch about 6 years ago) so moving from 10/100 to gigabit shouldn't cost much. If you're happy with your router the way it is, just buy a cheap switch with however many ports you need and use that. Just keep in mind that your bottleneck will be the interface between the switch and the router.

It's all in the box:
 

Deus Ex (my favorite game of all time)
Doom (1 and 2)
Quake 2
Half-Life (1 and 2)
Counter Strike
F.E.A.R. (Firefights with real dust effects blew my mind when I first played this)

Come on, anyone asking why/how you could use 2 Ethernet ports from a single PC probably does not have equipment that can do LACP...

RTFA, first page:
 
.........
 
the "AC1900" gear I mentioned twice was:
1. My description of how the AC3200 router behaves when you disable the second 5Ghz radio
2. an AC1900 router that they connected to the AC3200 router during their test
 
I mean, you thought that I was talking about your router in my response. Even when I was comparing the dual 5Ghz radio mode and the single 5Ghz radio mode. That's kinda the defining difference between AC1900 and AC3200. So the answer to your question is definitely no. If you don't know what it does differently then you shouldn't be spending money on it.

Then it's either a bad cable, bad drivers on your PC or an issue with your router or switch.

If you want to enable Wireless AutoConfig Service so you can run that netsh command do what it says in this post:
 
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-networking/wlansvc-service-in-windows-7-can-not-be-started/5bdc7d1c-ce54-4add-b437-eb48f50f7436
 
Also it's not standerd, it's standard. 

A better way is to open a cmd or powershell prompt and type in "netsh wlan show interfaces"
 
This will show you something like this:
 
  There is 1 interface on the system:       Name                   : Wi-Fi 2     Description            : Intel® Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260     GUID                   : 07aae3b8-8151-427e-b256-638b748dc6a1     Physical address       : fc:f8:ae:6d:42:9b     State                  : connected     SSID                   : comstar5GHz     BSSID                  : f8:1e:df:fd:01:b8     Network type           : Infrastructure     Radio type             : 802.11n     Authentication         : WPA2-Personal     Cipher                 : CCMP     Connection mode        : Auto Connect     Channel                : 149     Receive rate (Mbps)    : 300     Transmit rate (Mbps)   : 300     Signal                 : 99%     Profile                : comstar5GHz       Hosted network status  : Not available