Here’s the second of our home office upgrade series for the new year.

Suggestion No. 1 is to consider a wireless router upgrade. The logical question is, Why even consider a new router if the old one is working? Good point. If you’re like most folks, you’re increasingly dependent on mobile devices such as laptops, Wi-Fi radios, smartphones, tablets and even television viewing. Buying trends clearly show the sales of desktop PCs diminishing as mobile devices, even around the home, take precedence. The upshot is that throughput and speed with a Wi-Fi router are crucial. We had the opportunity to test the Nighthawk (R7000), the latest in Netgear’s dual-band 802.11ac router series, and found it to be a great asset, especially if you’re going to need a device that can support gaming and video streaming.

The specs are impressive — namely a dual-core 1GHz processor, powerful for a consumer product. Setup was a super fast, and for those who don’t even want to take the effort to come up with their own password, they even provided a preset "pw." Download speeds were good. Netgear has a proprietary wireless technology called "Beamforming," which directs a wireless signal from a router to wireless clients. You can also tweak the advanced and regular wireless settings on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz to wring out more performance. (We also updated the firmware, which also incrementally increased speed.)

Customer support is an asset that’s rarely discussed in reviews, and here Netgear excelled. I had help from a company tech support person in the Philippines, and the quality of his service was superb.

Finally, we tested the router’s capabilities for range around the house with a new Samsung Galaxy 4 smartphone, a 5-year-old Lenovo laptop and a 3-year-old Logitech Wi-Fi radio. Performance on all devices was noticeably snappier. Wi-Fi range was also vastly larger. For example, the smartphone was able to pick up the network 50 yards from the house! Evidently, we’re not alone in extolling the virtues of the Nighthawk (priced at $200 on Amazon): PC Magazine gave it its Editors’ Choice.

Suggestion No. 2 is something we’ve been preaching for years: Make sure you’re backed up. Nowadays the cloud is the only way to fly, and we have been talking about this for a while. Now we no longer talk about backing up files for small business or home business users. It is much simpler and more efficient to use cloud storage for all of your files. The two largest providers of that are Google and Microsoft.

Let’s look at the benefits.

When you use a full cloud storage service, you don’t need to worry about backing things up because that’s done by the provider. You are also no longer tied to any one system to use your files. They are available to you at any time from any Internet-connected device, including your smartphone. But what about working on files offline?

If you work with Google Drive (free for the first 15 GB) or Microsoft Sky Drive (7 GB free), you simply download the Google Drive or Sky Drive application that allows you to use it just like a drive on your system, and it allows you to work offline. You can, of course, add more storage for a low monthly or annual fee. What’s not to like? Forget your backup woes and just move your storage to the cloud.

Mike Meyer, formerly Internet general manager at Oceanic Time Warner Cable, is chief information officer at Honolulu Community College. Reach him at mmeyer@hawaii.edu.