with my former ISP, I used a wireless router that served the three PCs in
the three bedrooms of my house. since we moved to another ISP lately, and
they couldn't mount their so-called "home access gateway" (basically a wired
router) where the old router was, they had to put it in our living room. I
managed to configure our old router as an access point, wired to the
gateway, and it works fine... except, its range does not cover the whole
house, missing one of the rooms due to its peculiar layout. I thought I'd
buy a range extender and I went to my local shop browsing for some models,
finding out that the typical extender costs approximately twice as much as
an access point of the same brand. "that's because they sell many more ap's
than extenders", the clerk said. great. therefore I said to myself that, if
I had managed to find some docs on the net explaining how to configure a
router as an ap, it was worth to give a shot at trying to set up an ap as an
extender... but I didn't find anything nearly as exhaustive as the articles
I stumbled on during my former quest. instead I found out that "basic"
extenders cut your bandwidth in half because they only have one radio and
must continuously switch between rx/tx (I don't know, are there "advanced"
ones? are there extenders that don't halve your bandwidth, and if so how do
you tell by reading their boxes?), and several other limitations and
possible problems were hinted at, to the point of defining this whole brood
of machines as "EVIL".
at this point, I have three possible scenarios (cheapest to most expensive):

a) buy an access point, they have a D-Link at about EUR 40.00, and configure
it as an extender for my "router-configured-as-an-ap" :)

b) buy a proper extender, the only one they have at the shop is a D-Link
that costs about EUR 99.00.

c) screw all the job I did on turning my router into an ap (well, it hasn't
been that unbearable an effort, actually), and buy this amazing access point
I saw at the mall, with I-don't-know-how-many-powerful-antennae inside it
that purportedly keep on scanning your house for obstacles and send the
correct signal to every pc in the crib, promising to seamlessly cover
I-don't-remember-how-many-square-metres. I don't remember the manufacturer,
but this thingie was whiteish and costed about EUR 120.00.

is "a" possible? which one would you suggest? "a" and "b", of course, are
acceptable only given that the answer to my question concerning "advanced"
extenders is positive and that the gizmo I'll be using is one of them: I
definitely don't want to narrow my bandwidth.

thank you all in advance for your time

Swann