buying a router for the first time in a while

I haven't bought a router in about 4 years, but I need a new one now. I prefer Tomato over DD-WRT, but I'm not sure which router to get. I currently use a WRT54GS with Tomato as an extender to my DIR-655 which doesn't support any custom firmware unfortunately, but those need to stay at home. I'm not sure what to get, as I am unfamiliar with the new features floating around these days.
Will I need a new WLAN adapter for my laptop to take advantage of 600mbps speeds and a 5GHz connection for example? All of this is confusing to me. I know that I will use LAN a lot and the wireless will primarily be utilized by my roommates, so I'm not quite sure what to get.

Some things we need to know before we make recomendations.

Budget?
What is this 600mbps wireless you speak of?

If I was in your shoes some things I would want are, gigabit connections for the wired portion, since you will use it the most. Most computers these days can support this. USB connections would be kind of nice too. You could have a media share or printer share. Dual simultanious 2.4ghz and 5ghz radios, or 2 routers to do this. I personally use 2 routers because my roommate has some G devices and when you put G devices on an N network on a router with one radio you get a network that operates on G speeds. Chances are some of devices or rommmates systems probably don't all support 5ghz. So they would not be able to see the new router if it only did 5ghz.

We have no idea if your laptop will work with 5ghz because you never told us what you have.

I like Tomato as well, and currently run it, but it has not been updated officially for years. There are a couple of people who have forked the project and are kind of making their own builds. I use Toastman Mod builds which seem to work well but are slightly more complicated to get going the first time. http://www.linksysinfo.org/index....rmware.33/

Quote from LiquidRetro : What is this 600mbps wireless you speak of?

Four-stream 802.11n [wikidevi.com] is 600mbps. It is also very uncommon. 802.11ac will make it unnecessary too.

Unfortunately Newegg has started labeling dual-band 300mbps routers as 600mbps routers which is very misleading.