Running Sage Client wirelessly on a notebook

[Chriscic]

Is anyone out there is happily running Sage Client wirelessly with HD content, bouncing from room to room in a carefree fashion without anything more than an occasional small glitch.?

This was until recently my vision… I was going to get the HP Mini 311 with Ion, wireless N built-in, and be able to watch TV or my movies anywhere in the house at anytime. This would especially be useful when my 2 year-old is hogging the TV with Dora or Blues Clues.

I was ready to bite the bullet on the on the purchase, but then a relative visited with his MacBook Pro. It’s got more than enough processing power to play HD smoothly, and has wireless N built-in, so I installed Sage Client.

The long and short of it was that I could find a few select locations in the house where things played pretty smoothly, for the most part it worked very poorly. This makes me question whether the Mini 311 would do any better.
Wondering if maybe an external USB N adapter might perform better, or maybe I’d need a dual-band router with 5ghz to get what I want (not that I want to buy a new router… I have I think the D-Link 655 now and no issues).

I know wireless is flaky… I’ve had plenty of experience with that in the past. If someone else is having great success though, it’d be helpful for me to hear about it.

Finally, I really want to stream without transcoding. If I’m going to transcode with placeshifter I can do it on any ol’ notebook… don’t need ion for that.
Thanks.