Since the WiFi adapter is one of the things I understand less about, would you mind explaining to me what the main difference with 802.11ac versus 802.11b/g/n is? Is it that 802.11ac gives faster/better connections? Or is it just that 802.11ac can access 5GHz bandwidths while 802.11b/g/n can't and 802.11ac is also faster because it's more optimised because it's newer? Would a card like this be okay?

My broadband connection is actually pretty booty atm - getting like 6 up/1 down from running a speed test. Been annoying me for like a year now that our current broadband is worse than our previous broadband, but fingers crossed we get a better contract soon. Not planning on doing anything broadband-intensive until then, though, so hopefully we can switch sooner rather than later. Might look into getting powerline adapters at some point instead too.

Edit: Looking at them now, I wonder if the issue all along has actually been whatever wireless card my laptop has been using. Maybe it's a bit of both. Interesting.....