[bbig119]

I work in a research lab that is spread over several rooms along a hallway. We currently have a fragmented network where computers are plugged into university wall outlets to gain internet access. There are two problems with this.
1. the university network is flaky, making it difficult to print to our networked printer sometimes
2. we have equipment that is currently not on the network that I would like to install wireless cards in, so that we can print and grab files from them.

It's not really feasible to run wires between the rooms, so I need to come up with an alternative.
1. I could use a number of wireless access points/extenders to make a lan with a single subnet/DHCP server, using a single university wall jack. This would work, but I'm not sure it would be able to hold up if we wanted to transfer large files.

2. I think I can use multiple routers, one in each room, connected to the internet via a university jack, and then use DD-WRT to allow the multiple subnets to see each other via a VLAN or some other method. I'm just not sure how easy it is to do this, and how well it would work.

Budget isn't really an issue here. I just want to be able to buy the right equipment with straightforward install to get this working, so that I can focus on research.