Need advice and help please

[romeo5k]

Okay, i have a few questions
The Comcast was installed in a weird location and we have to leave it there.. It was installed at the furthest wall on the right of the house. Yet, my den is on the furthest wall to the left of the house (EXACTLY OPPOSITE POSITIONING).
I'm using a Netgear router on channel 1 and for some odd reason, in the den it hardly picks up signal. So i decided to buy a Netgear EXTENDER/AP. I positioned it in the middle of house (as an extender) between outmost left(DEN) and outmost right wall. Well now the den picks up the signal, but my speeds of 25-30mbps (FROM ROUTER) is now running at maybe ~1mbps (FROM EXTENDER) which sucks because my Firestick is in my DEN.
That's my dilemma, and i think I've come up with a solution.
I'm going to run a 50ft Cat5e cable from router to my Netgear EXT and keep it in middle of the house and now use it as an AP, rather than and EXT. I want to make sure i do all this correct. And not making too many n00b mistakes.

1.I read that i maybe should or shouldn't keep the same SSID? In my case which do your think is more beneficial?
2. I'm going to sit router at channel 11 and AP at channel 1, is that okay?
3. By keeping SSID, that would mean i keep same password and also, same ip range. Nothing should change, or should it??
Any other suggestions or ideas?

***for info, im using a wn3000rpv3 on a Netgear AC1750 router****

[Philip]

You are right that it is much better to connect them with an Ethernet cable and configure the second device as an Access Point, rather than Extender - this should fix the speed issues, as far as the Wi-Fi is concerned. You are also right to keep them on different non-overlapping channels (1-6-11 in the US).

If you keep the same SSID/pass, your clients will be able to connect to either. This usually works well, except, the only problem is you have to be almost out of range of the first AP for clients to connect to the other.
If you set them as different SSIDs/pass, then you can manually choose which one you want to connect to, losing the automatic switch-over from one to the other.