“It froze again!” She yells.

“Well, what did you do to it, now?” I reply accusingly – because, apparently, I have no shame.

As soon as the mock-innocent look came onto her face, however, I knew I was screwed. “I was just checking the legal sites.”

“Legal sites?” Not knowing yet I was being set up worse than Bill Clinton at the Paula Jones deposition.

“Yes, I'm checking the case law. I want to see whether any wife has sued for divorce on grounds of alienation of broadband connection and PC negligence.”

Yeah, you can spread the butter now. I'm toast.

I started trying to save my marriage with the new generation of home phoneline networks. Network purists and speed demons may blanch, but since I reviewed the first generation of phoneline networks years ago (which is when my wife got her first taste of broadband goodness), I have been a fan of their easy setup and acceptable performance for Web surfing. And if you are planning to network multiple floors in a home, it sure beats drilling holes in the floorboards to run your own CAT-5 wires. Once your main server PC is setup, then any room with a phone jack is on the network. Better still, the new version 2 HomePNA standard is rated to run at up to 10MPS, ten times the speed of the first-gen systems. And the three kits I used, from 3Com, NetGear and Intel all worked very well.

I started with 3Com's very good HomeConnect kit containing 2 PCI cards. The software setup is pure plug and play. Pop in the PCI card, run the packed-in phone line from card to phone jack, and Win95 and the drivers do the rest. At setup, you assign one computer as the host (the one with the high speed Web connection) and the rest become clients. You can choose which drives and printers on which systems are shared. It should be noted that 3Com partners with Microsoft and offers the “HomeClick Network Center” with its kits. This is a very user-friendly interface that can tag all of the machines and printers on the network with the relevant room locations (kitchen, living room, etc.) and lets you monitor network status easily from a single console. Among the packages I saw, 3Com had the best all-around interface for most novices.