CAT 5 wiring

Just keep your terminations neat. Maintain the twist in the wires all the way to the punch and don't make them any longer than they have to be to fit in the punch terminals. There is a lot of urban legend out there about running the wire too close to AC lines and such but 99% of the problems happen in the last half inch of the cable.

Black Box.com has some good information on the color codes. You can look at the tools there or Jensen tools.com. Personally unless your going to make a living at doing this I would go to Radio Shack and get what I need.

Hosfelt.com or jameco.com is a whole lot cheaper if you can wait a week.

An RJ45 crimper is a nice touch but beyond that it is just regular hand tools. The string in the cable is to strip the jacket. Wire strippers will almost always ding the wire. Peel it back far enough to get the string, rip the jacket open with the string and cut off that part you "peeled". All of the connections are Insulation Displacement so you don't strip the conductors. You could buy a 110 punch blade but the plastic one packaged with the keystones will work for a casual user.

Great! Thanks for the info. One more question - can I do this? Room1Router-----Room2----Room3----Room4 all on one port from the router? Essentially, running from the router to the first rj45 where two cables are connected to the wiring side of the rj45 - an in bound and an outbound both connected to the rj45 - ie spliced in the rj45.

Home run everything back to the point you want to be your hub. I have mine next to the PC in my living room, which was a mistake. The whole point of "structured wiring" is to radiate from a single point that you can use to host your routers, hubs etc. I ended up with a cludge of stuff next to my PC that looks like the bridge of the enterprise. It should really be in my wiring closet. (or so my wife says) It is what happens when you start wiring without a plan. If you do have multiple uses in a certain spot, you can drop a hub in there. Cat 5e can even support more than one LAN in the cable but that is unsupported officially. What is verboten in a business environment is running the phone along with the LAN in a single cable. Ring spikes will spike your data. I doubt you will notice in your home (error recovery will deal with it) but you are still dealing with 100v or so when the phone rings. There are a lot of "throughput" issues that are significant with 20 users banging a LAN but will probably never show up at home.
I assume you are wiring for Ethernet 10/100 networking? Logically this is a bus (pure collision) but physically there needs to be a hub or router at every termination of a cable to connect send and recieve data. With 2 machines you can use a twisted cable but at 3 that won't work. Think RS232 send/rec data and the null modem idea. I have some "bullet points" from my IBM connnectivity classes about hubs, routers, gateways and bridges if you want them. I will have to scan them into PDFs Basically a hub just connects all the cables together and gets the send/recieve going the right way. A router connects 2 same type LANs together like the WAN from the cable modem to your LAN and provides some simple firewalling A bridge connects different types of lan together (Token Ring to Ethernet for example) although they can be the same type. You can have firewalling there too. A gateway gets you into entirely different architectures. Mainframe CICS to LAN, for example.

If you want it to work you really don't need much.
If you want it CAT 5 certified you should use CAT 5 tools.

No.

This is a star wired network from the hub out, no daisy chaining. Bear in mind you can use one cat5 for 2 paths so you could hit 2 rooms with one cable. You could also put a hub in all but the last down stream room. They are cheap.
room1 just PC to room2 hub conn to room2 PC, out to room 3 (hub/pc) to room4 with just a PC.. Each hub is a virtual splitter

Thanks again - nice description!
You have it right - it's ethernet 10/100 with 2 PC's permanently wired to a Linksys router in room 1. Periodically I connect my third - a thinkpad - to the router, leaving 1 port available. I wanted to connect the 4th PC, which "lives" downstairs in room 4, via wireless to avoid crawling around in the attic to install cat5. It connects with the new wireless router plugged into the last port on the Linksys, but it is very low signal strength and gets knocked off
My new plan is to wire a single rj45 in room2, permanently attached to the last available port on the Linksys. Then I'll plug the new wireless router into that hub - the new PC is in the room directly below. I already tested that with a long cat5 jumper cable, and it connects reliably with max signal strength. The wireless easily works in rooms 2, 3, & 4 when it is installed in room2.

Here's some stuff to read:
(look at the "common" category items)

Nice!
I finished the wiring today - just 1 room at the farthest point - works fine. I discovered the Home Depot has cat5 stuff, as well as Rat Shack. When we need the other two rooms, I'll use the wireless or your hub idea. Right now, I *don't* want to go back crawling in the attic.