I am not completely illiterate or ignorant with regards to networking and computers, but I am really hitting a wall with this one. Between trying to take care of an 11-month-old and trying to find information on the various forums out there I have given myself a migraine. I have become frustrated, and feel a bit defeated by this. Worst of all, I feel like it should be something really simple but its kicking my butt!! I have finally decided it might be worth my time to pick someone's brain here instead of calling it quits.

Recently I moved into a new home, basically doubling my square footage, so I ordered myself a shiny new router that I hoped would be able to function properly in the larger home. What arrived was a Linksys EA7500. (Not what I had ordered, but it's what I got and I am living with it.)  I set it up and a few days later started to finally notice its limitations.

When it was downstairs it worked great for the downstairs, and even provided decent signal strength on that end of the house upstairs. However, on the opposite end of the house the signal strength was very poor upstairs. My laptop would lose connection often enough to make me move both my modem and router upstairs since that is where the internet is used most often.

I was looking at the various boosters and extenders out there when I saw mentioned using an old router. Well I conveniently had one laying around, it was the old one that I had been using at my previous home, so I started trying to sort this out. I grabbed the old Cisco/Linksys E2500, my laptop, and found a quiet corner to try and get this thing up and running while the wife wrangled the little one.

It became obvious early on that the stock firmware on the router was not going to be up to the task so I installed DD-WRT. I found a tutorial and tried to follow along but still didn't make any progress. Now I am wondering if this is even something I can do. Some were saying yes, it can be done. Others say it can't do what I want. All I am wanting to do is to use it to boost my WiFi signal on the opposite end of the house without having to pull some CAT6 to connect it to my main router. I was hoping someone here could help me cut through the B.S. and get some straight answers, is this even possible with what I have on hand or am I wasting my time?

If you want to work well you are going to have to run cat5 to that part of the house and put in an access point. Or move the current router to a more central location closer to where you want to use it the most. Other wise you can get wifi extenders that boost your current signal and put the booster half way between the router and where you want to signal to be better. But they don't work that well in my experience. Even if DD-WRT made the routers transmit power higher which I assume was the point of trying to install it. It doesn't mean the devices would have enough power to transmit back to the router.

Buy two, or three, Ubiquiti Unifi APs, or AC lites, etc.  Run one wired.  The other one (or two) can be configured to extend the wifi network.  Place them at far ends of the house.

Best solution:
Run a distributed AP setup hardwired together using either Ubiquiti's Unifi (which requires APs and a controller host, usually a computer) or a Mikrotik based router/AP system using RouterOS's CAPSMAN. Unifi versus CAPSMAN, Unifi wins in ease of setup while Mikrotik wins in price (but only by $10 a unit).

Second best solution:
A single Unifi AP as a master with the others slaved (meshed) to extend the range or RouterOS AP's meshed in the same manner. Again, same pros/cons as the best solution.