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Best performaning setup for extending wifi network?

pangaea

So the router is in my roomate's bedroom on the third floor of a townhouse. I live in the basement. I get good enough speeds but the signal strength can occasionally be a bit unreliable. I also have a VPN (issue still occurs without the VPN) so I'm considering three setups:

 

-Keep what I have now. It may not be a worthwhile trade-off to have improved reliability for a slight performance hit.

 

-Get a cheap wifi extender, will improve signal strength but possibly cause a slight performance hit. I used them at a place I used to work at to improve signal strength at the edges of the office as well as create some poor man's VLANs and segment off the network reduce the possibility that someone would say accidentally print to a printer in the other room and have to run upstairs (that was a huge nuisance at one point, as I was the IT guy dealing with non-techie co-workers yelling "I can't print!" on a nearly daily basis). We had pretty good experiences with them so it could be a good solution for my personal use as well.

 

-Get a router and use it in wireless repeater mode. Not sure if the performance could be better as any performance benefit would likely come out of giving a wired connection to my desktop but it would also open up the possibility of running my VPN on the router instead of on each device. A decent router costs a little more than a repeater though.

Home desktop: AMD FX-6350 CPU, AMD 7950 GPU, 12GB DDR3 RAM, 2x250GB SSD (RAID 0) for main drive, 1TB HDD for extra storage, Windows 10

 

Work desktop: Intel Q8400 core 2 quad CPU, Nvidia GeForce 8400GS Rev 2 GPU, 4GB DDR2 RAM, 120GB SSD for main drive, 250GB HDD for extra storage, Linux Mint 18.3

 

Personal Laptop: Lenovo W540; bought a used workstation laptop on eBay that just needed a hard drive for half of what they were going for in working order at the time. Intel i7 vPro, 16 GB DDR3 RAM, 500GB SSD

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