I recently purchased a refurbished Netgear WG102 802.11g Access Point off of ebay. It was triggered by my neighbour's ISP connection failing when they forced an upgrade on him (avoid Wanadoo/Orange). I helped him out by sharing access to my Internet connection but the signal was very weak. He had to dangle his WiFi dongle out the window to get it to work :-)
I've had range troubles with my 802.11b network inside the house so it was time to upgrade. At £31, it was cheap.
You may have noticed that I tend to stick with Netgear. Their products generally work well...
I used to smugly think I worked in a clean, pollution-free industry. Ha! But that was many years ago before any talk of climate change. Electronics is notoriously bad for the environment. First there's the huge amount of electricity and batteries required. You've probably heard that a DVD player uses more electricity waiting in stand-by mode than it ever uses being played. All those nasty "wall wart" adapters waste electricity just being plugged in even if the device isn't on. Things like NiCad batteries can't be recycled and add poisonous waste to the rubbish. It's better to use regular batteries...