To save you from having to pull twisted-pair Ethernet wire or coax cable through your walls we looked at using two wiring schemes your home is already equipped with. Namely your 110v electrical wiring and your telephone wiring.
As scary as it may sound there is a product from Intelogis called the PassPort Plug-In Network that lets you plug your PCs' and printers' parallel ports right into your electrical outlets to form a LAN. PassPort comes with a set of module components that plug into the wall and a cable connects a module to your computer or printer. It was extremely easy to set up and get our test computers talking to each other and to the printer in the kid's room. It's worth noting that the printer did not have to be connected to a computer at all, just plugged into the wall.
The other way to go is to use your existing telephone wiring. Using Tut Systems HomeRun network interface cards we were able to plug each computer right into a phone jack to connect them. More involved to initially set up, HomeRun allows you to network your computers while not interfering with normal telephone activity in the least.
Check out this hardware review in the PC/Computing March issue,
Digital Office section, page 116.
http://www.zdnet.com/pccomp/stories/
reviews/0,5672,388095,00.html
