Sorry to be a party pooper MB, but care to explain how a cheap consumer grade router plugged into a cheap, rate-limited, packet-shaped, contended internet connection potentially also being used by someone who has an under-specced laptop ridden with tons of un-necessary background processes is likely to have any effect whatsoever.
Placebo effects. Like most of those registry hacks and other rubbish you see around the internet.
You can't polish a !!!!.
By facilitating the removal of the software firewall that's no doubt been crippling his laptop.
You can't polish a !!!!, but in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king
(and at ~£40 it's worth it purely for the stateful firewall, NAT and wireless-N - especially if the guy doesn't want the equivalent of a comms rack in his house).
It won't of course "speed up your internet browsing", it'll slow it down, blindingly obviously, as it's one more hop and hence extra delay for each packet. Probably not enough to notice though.
Not so blindingly obvious if you read my previous post. Software firewalls are <extremely naughty swear word indicating 'not very good at all in the main'>
Adding wireless is not something to do lightly. Unless you really know what you're doing you're inviting hackers in - it's hardly a solution to a security issue, it's creating a security issue!!
Oh come on. If you had to choose between a badly configured software firewall or a wireless network without a password I know which I would choose. At least you'd get half a chance of eyeballing the dick wardriving outside your house (if the signal even reached that far), whereas if you ever looked at the frequency of port scans on the internet you wouldn't want to sleep at night.