howdy empa.

hopefully, your router is a NAT firewall as well. this would give you some protection against the various bad bandwidth on the net. if so, then all bandwidth coming from that router would have the same WAN IP, although it would have a different LAN IP. personally, i like Netgear equipment (and always go for switches... never hubs)

not sure about Vanguard, but look for the latest drivers and maybe that'll squeeze a few more pixels/second for you.

you should also look into getting synergy to work between the two machines with a single keyboard/mouse. very useful